In the Nuxalk First Nation village of Bella Coola in British Columbia, Canada, one often hears this world weary statement-------"Once, there were millions of oolichan here"........... "You could scoop them with buckets. Now they’re gone"............ "The steelhead are gone"................ "There aren’t enough fish for the bears anymore, so they get into people’s fruit trees"............ "People say, We need to shoot them"............"Then the trophy hunters come—all dressed up in camouflage"............ "They say it’s a sport, killing grizzlies"............While not technically a legal statute, in 2012, nine First Nations declared a unilateral ban on grizzly-hunting in their traditional territories...No one hunts Griz for their meat, just for bragging rights and trophies..............And therefore, every year in this Province, 300 of our largest North American terrestrial carnivore are killed............. B.C.’s government biologists claim that their research shows the grizzly population—after a long decline—is now increasing, spreading eastward into the Kootenays and southward toward Whistler. .................This allows the biologists to assert that the current grizzly “harvest” is sustainable, and that the death of 300 or so grizzlies in B.C. each year doesn’t threaten the overall bear population .................Carnivore biologist Chris Darimont has spent the past 15 years studying the ecology of B.C.’s central coast and has come to believe that provincial wildlife biologists are regularly producing junk science................... “You have people,” he says, “who don’t give a shit about grizzly bears........................ So you get hunt-management science that’s full of errors....................... The biologists seldom go into the field. Instead, they use ‘opinion modelling’................. Making inferences. Guesstimates. Extrapolations................. They manufacture data.................... They never use scientific peer review................. You end up with ‘facts’ shaped by political considerations, not by good science................ Darimont and other independent scientists maintain, in fact, there are no solid figures on the B.C. grizzly population—it could be as low as 6,000—and that provincial scientists inflate the numbers to justify a continuation of the trophy hunt

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Can grizzly bear watchers end B.C.'s trophy hunt?

by DANIEL WOOD on AUG 6, 2014 at 10:05 AM

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This magnificant Great Bear Rainforest grizzly is worth much more
alive than dead.