My mind is going! I originally posted and deleted the following post. It is now back up because I ended up linking to the wrong post at the Black Bear Blog. …
I have been following the updates to the possible cancellation of the New Jersey bear hunt at the Black Bear Blog and Moose Droppings. You can also read this article from the Daily Record. This smacks of the ‘un-scientific’ emotional anti-bear hunting campaign that got the Ontario spring bear hunt canceled. A classic case of big-city politics making small town decisions with poor ‘intel’.
Here is what New Jersey rural towns can expect (if what is happening in Ontario is any indicator):
- increased bear/human interaction (despite the movies-bears are not human kind compatible) due to bear population increase
- a waste of taxpayer’s money on automated bear help hotlines for RURAL callers to learn to live in ‘harmony’ with garbage raiding, dog eating, shed destroying beasts
- exponential explosion of nuisance bear calls to police and emergency services (they should be fighting crime and helping human emergencies)
- loss of hunting related revenue and industry relating to bear hunting
- more orphaned bear cubs due to male bruin’s predation in large populations of bears
Can you tell I am not bitter? I guess we are somewhat luckier here (in Ontario) in that we STILL have a fall bear hunt. It would be interesting to note that the same people (MNR) that canceled our spring hunt are NOW issuing 2 bear tags (instead of one per hunter) in many Wildlife Management Units because of the large numbers of bears. A secret that the ‘antis’ who pushed for the cancellation may not know about.
I copied (below) a portion of an earlier post regarding my frustration with our Bear Hotline:
Caller: Hello. I would like to report a bear acting aggressively around my house by tearing apart my shed…
Bear Wise Operator: Sir have you cleaned your barbeque after each use? Where do you keep your garbage? Is it stored in an airtight, titanium galvanized, government certified holding tank? Do you feed the birds? I would suggest you let the bear do what he wants. After all, he probably is just checking for forest fires.
Caller: BANG!! Sounds of reloading in the background
Bear Wise Operator: Sir was that a gun? Did you shoot the bear?!
Caller: No it was not a gun. It was my government registered, forged steel, high velocity lead projection device and I was showing the bear how it worked!
Ontario Out of Doors magazine reports that several hundred thousand dollars are going into this bear hot-line while ministry vehicles sit idle with little funds for gas or field agents.
Hang in there New Jersey hunters. We are all in this together.
Bill Anderson
Muskoka Outdoors
I read that Ontario had just cancelled the spring bear hunt. Pretty ridiculous, since the hunting regs there boast the largest concentration of black bears in North America. There should really be more stringent criteria on who gets jobs proposing rural policies so that city born-and-raised people can no longer run around making laws that just don’t work in the real outdoors. The New Jersey situation is particularly ridiculous. The black bear population in that state is thriving, despite the fact that it is the most populated state. Anyone living there should make it their responsibility to know the danger the bears pose when their population numbers are maxed out, both to each other and to humans. You would think they would remember that baby that got snatched off her front porch a couple of years ago.