ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An Anchorage Superior Court judge in an order issued this past week denied a request to strike down a controversial state-sponsored predator control program that has so far killed 180 bears in southwest Alaska.

But in the same ruling, Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin criticized the Alaska Department of Fish and Game effort as circumventing a previous court ruling that found the program was unlawful.

She stopped short of demanding the department halt the program, leaving open the possibility the state could resume shooting bears from a helicopter in the third year of a policy that state wildlife officials say they established to help rebuild the Mulchatna caribou herd.

“The Alaska Supreme Court has noted that injunctions and restraining orders are not an appropriate means for the judiciary to manage fish and game resources,” Rankin wrote in Wednesday’s decision. It wasn’t im- mediately clear whether the state will decide to begin killing bears this month as originally planned.

The decision last week came in response to a request for an injunction filed in April by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, an environmental advocacy group. The group sought a halt to the predator control season expected to resume this spring.

The request came after the Alaska Board of Game passed an emergency order in late March to keep the bear program on track weeks after a different judge ruled that it was unconstitutional.

In a written statement Thursday, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance did not address the judge’s denial of the injunction request, but said Rankin’s ruling upheld earlier findings that the program is unlawful and should not be executed.

If the state does move forward with the Mulchatna program this year, it’s the Alliance’s understanding that “they would be doing so in contempt of court,” the group said.

The state’s emergency order still doesn’t meet the standards set by the original judge’s order in March, according to the group.

The Alaska Wildlife Alliance said its next legal steps will depend on how the state proceeds.

A spokesperson for Fish and Game said Thursday that the department was still assessing Rankin’s decision and did not yet have a comment.

Rankin’s ruling was narrowly focused on procedural elements involved in the state’s Mulchatna predator control program, rather than the merits of the program itself.

The state’s Mulchatna predator control program changed in 2023, when Fish and Game undertook a new initiative aiming to kill all bears on the herd’s calving grounds in order to reduce predation on newborn caribou.