LARAMIE - Wilderness supporters have a "huge responsibility" to make their views known about a process that could lead to removing grizzly bears from endangered species protection, bear specialist Doug Peacock said.

If the delisting proposal goes through, "the people of Wyoming will bear the onus for the future of the grizzly," Peacock declared at a meeting on Friday sponsored by the Wyoming Wilderness Association and allied groups.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission has said it will begin receiving public comments in February to determine biologically suitable and socially acceptable areas for grizzlies to be allowed to roam.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will consider management plans submitted by Wyoming, Idaho and Montana in considering delisting of the grizzly.

Peacock, who served as a Green Beret medic during the Vietnam War, said he returned from the war so disillusioned that "I crawled back into the brush, sort of like a wounded animal."

In the process, he became acquainted with the grizzly, which he had previously encountered only once as a "punk kid" visiting Alaska. His first adult encounter was with a mother and two cubs in Yellowstone National Park.

"I hung out with grizzlies from then on," he said.

"I have never questioned the route this journey took."

He became friends with Timothy Treadwell, a bear specialist who, along with Amie Huguenard, was killed in an encounter with a grizzly in Alaska.

Treadwell "loved those bears," Peacock said. "A lot of people didn't like that. There was a lot of 'I told you so.' We didn't seem to have a category for this kind of death."

"This is not to say he didn't get too close to bears, because I think he did," Peacock said. He said grizzlies are dangerous, "probably more dangerous than polar bears," but have been unfairly stigmatized as "evil beasts that will eat our children."

Of his experiences with the animals in the wilds, he said, "fear losing the opportunity of having this kind of an encounter in life."

Peacock said the grizzly habitat is being eroded by global warning, and they are moving south from the Yellowstone area. "That's good," he said. Of the Game and Fish Commission plans, he said, "I smell a rat already. I would never draw a line on the map" as to "where bears can and can't go."

"The bears belong to everybody," he said. "If they delist the grizzly, that's it. It's a huge responsibility. Where are the bears going to be in 35 years?"

"The cheapest exit from our culture is a trip into the wildnerness," Peacock said. And even beyond that, "I would like to see places where by mutual consent we agree not to go."

Peacock is the author of a memoir, "The Grizzly Years," and another book, "Baja," and writes frequently for magazines. "Peacock's War," an hour-long documentary about his work with grizzlies, has won two grand prizes at film festivals.