Juliet's cub - July 28, 2012We saw no hunters today but heard 11 distant shots between 5:30 and 6:30 PM. The trail walkers were free to roam trails without worries of disturbing anyone. At 4:50 PM, a team was quietly photographing a spider when a big twig snapped nearby. The people moved to look, and the bear was gone without a glimpse. People who have been walking and talking have seen nothing after the first day when cub climbed and the mother retreated. So far, whether people are quiet or talking, no bear has approached anyone for food. With the sun going down, one team was going out and another team was calling in that they were lost and didn’t have flashlights. They gave us their GPS coordinates. We drove to the nearest road, honked the horn, and within a half hour they were out.
The project is fun, exciting, and teams are working together to gather data. On top of that, we received encouraging news of study bears seen at distant feeding stations. Hunting activity will shift to small game hunting and archery deer hunting in less than a week. Most of the bears that are killed are killed in the first two weeks, and fewer than usual hunting permits were issued this year. The worst may be over for the study bears.
Concerning the Maine referendum, there are 3 issues: trapping, hounding, and baiting. Ending trapping would be easy if the bill were not complicated by the baiting issues. Few people trap. Maine is the last state to allow it, and most people don’t believe it is fair chase or a quick kill. It involves mental and physical cruelty to a degree that depends upon how infrequently the trapper checks his traps. Thank goodness, it affects few bears.
Hounding has more participants. The biggest problem is the summer practice season. A HSUS video, filmed by hunters and confiscated by the police, shows how the practice season is used to teach dogs to be aggressive toward bears. When dogs set upon a cub or yearling, they can be aggressive without getting hurt. The video shows a cub that was spread eagled by a pack. The cub somehow escaped under some roots only to have the hunter probe the cub with a stick to force it out against the pack again. When the Minnesota House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources saw this video as part of a hearing on hounding in Minnesota, state representatives asked Department of Natural Resources officials if they could prevent such cruelty. The DNR said they didn’t have the manpower. Representatives then asked the hounding lobby if they could prevent their hunters from such cruelty. They said they would try. Not good enough. The committee resoundingly defeated the bill and it has not come up again. Another problem with hounding is trespass. The practice season is during the vacation season, and vacationers tend not to want bears pursued through their yards. The main thing against hounding though is hounds getting hold of cubs and hounds harassing bears by chasing them throughout the practice season. The idea that this teaches bears to fear people seems flawed. The bears are running from and being bitten by hounds—not people. And a bear that is shot dead cannot pass on its knowledge.
A bill that deals only with trapping and hounding would likely be successful. Throwing in baiting—the practice that affects the most bears—complicates the issues, as we mentioned last night. The wounding losses that will result without baiting becomes an overall big negative for bears. The most humane way to limit the kill is with quick, killing shots. The number killed is best limited by season length and the number of hunting licenses—not by making it harder to make a killing shot.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center