Reply To: Garbaging for Bears

[David Petersen]

#41151

Maine and CO are different states with different situations. Yet the issues and justification and fears you quote are so remarkable similar, consider please these well documented statistic facts (as opposed to hearsay and speculation):

Since Colorado banned baiting and hounding bears by ballot initiative in 1992, the annual number of bear hunters has risen, the annual number of bears killed by hunters has risen, and the annual average size of checked bears has increased amazingly … all of these gains gradually rising on a fairly steady upward curve across the years. Back then, also, the fans of the status quo, largely baiting outfitters and their clients, plus of course the predator-phobic agriculture community, and claimed the ballot initiative was the work of HSUS, but they didn’t come in until the last minute, after they saw it was going to win and wanted to grab credit. The movement was in fact started and overwhelming driven by concerned hunters including me, concerned nonhunters (not antihunters) and a few valiant Div. of Wildlife biologists and wildlife managers who had given up trying to use the system for change, since the system is political and ag-driven, ignoring rather than upholding establish research science. Everyone, including Tom Beck the leading black bear biologist in the West at the time and a dedicated bowhunter (see his “A Failure of the Spirit, p 200, in A Hunter’s Heart), finally, after years of effort, gave up attempting to convince the CO Wildlife Commission (political appointees, not professional wildlife managers, and always heavy on ranchers) to end baiting and hounding. Aside from being considered grossly unethical by many hunters and a 2/3 majority of the nonhunting public and thus shining a dirty light on all hunting (agreed to by P&Y and B&C) garbaging for bears and executing treed bears strongly favored selectively killing large males and consequently had driven the size of the average checked bear down to embarrassingly and biologically unsupportably low levels. In the end, hunters who had never hunted bear during the days of hounding and baiting took up the sport after the ban, explaining it was no longer a dishonorable activity. But I’ve said this all before, for example see “‘Brain-dead Political Hacks and other Friends of Wildlife’: Black Bear Management in Colorado,” p. 181 in Ghost Grizzlies.