Florida just held its first bear hunt in several decades, targeting 300 of the bruins for death. Just three years ago, the black bear was listed as threatened, and the state’s bears had not been hunted since 1994.
The proximate reason for the hunt is that bears, according to representatives of the Florida Wildlife Commission, is that a growing bear population is contributing to greater conflicts between humans and bears. Hunters and the Wildlife Commission like to portray the issue as “problem bears”, but the reality is that there are no problem bears, only problem humans.
Most of these conflicts are due to human negligence. People leaving food attractants like unsecured garbage cans which train bears to forage near humans.
Ironically, indiscriminate hunting is not likely to reduce conflicts. For one thing, most hunters do not hunt immediately next to subdivisions where most conflicts are occurring. Rather they are most likely to the larger parcels of public or private lands. So the animals that hunters are killing, are not likely to be the ones that are wandering the edges of communities.
The second problem with indiscriminate hunting is that it’s difficult for a hunter to determine the sex of a bear. Many females with cubs are killed, leaving the young bears orphaned. Orphaned bears are inexperienced at foraging and desperate to eat, are more likely to be attracted to human foods.
So in effect, hunting only exacerbates the problem that the Florida Wildlife Commission seeks to solve.
The worse part of the hunt is that it ignores the social ecology of predators. Fish and Game agency always talk about maintaining populations. The problem with this kind of management is that it ignores the demographics of wildlife. Hunting tends to skew populations towards younger animals. So even if you maintain the same “population” if the population consists of many young inexperienced animals, you automatically create conflicts. Young animals are less likely to know the location of natural food resources, and are less successful as hunters. As a consequence, they are the very animals most likely to seek out garbage, livestock, and other human food resources.
Whether it is hunting of black bears in Florida, or the recent announcement by Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife to increase cougar hunting, wildlife agencies across the country tend to ignore predator social ecology. In effect, by having indiscriminate hunting and trapping of predators, these state wildlife agencies create a self-reinforcing loop. Predators are killed, resulting in a younger population, which in turn is more likely to create human conflicts, that are then used as an additional justification for more killing.
I see no evidence anywhere that state wildlife agencies are using the latest ecological science in their attitude and management of predators. It suggests that wildlife agencies cannot be trusted to manage predators. Keep in mind, that predators numbers will not grow indefinitely. They are self-managing, primarily by the availability of prey and food, as well as social interaction. Except perhaps for very specific surgical removal of individual animals, there is no good justification for killing predators. Even the argument that “I’m feeding my family” used by some hunters seldom applies to most predators which are not usually consumed.
Predators serve an important ecological function. Bears, for instance, move seeds of some plants around—think of the huckleberry that may be deposited in their droppings. Cougar can thin elk and deer herds to reduce their herbivory on favor plants like aspen and willow. Wolves can remove the injured and sick from a population.
Hunting of predators makes no sense in today’s world.
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https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&sqi=2&ved=0CB4QqQIwAGoVChMI7t6O4vDhyAIVwvM-Ch2qcgQW&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fdaily%2Fintelligencer%2F2015%2F10%2Fflorida-cuts-short-its-big-black-bear-hunt.html&usg=AFQjCNEBAq3ucp8wROwIDiyLsRBQboUvDg&bvm=bv.105841590,d.cWwFlorida Called Off Its Big Black-Bear Hunt After It Became a Black-Bear Massacre
Florida decided that something had to be done to reduce the number of black bearsinteracting with humans, who have increasingly been encroaching on their traditional settlement areas, with sometimesunfortunate results.
The state took the measured response of initiating a weeklong statewide bear hunt for the trash-hungry omnivores. It doled out more hunting permits (3,779) than the last known count of the bear population (3,300). The first weekend of bear bloodbath was such a success that officials had to call off the hunt after only 48 hours. The bear body count by that point had already reached 295.
The wildlife commission had set a cap of 320 bears, nearly 10 percent of the state's bear population.
Biologists with Florida's wildlife commission say the high numbers point to a robust and fully recovered bear population.
Just three years ago, the black bear was on the state's endangered-species list. The population was bouncing back from a low of around 300 in 1970, down from 11,000 at its mid-century peak. Hunting was suspended in 1994.
One reason for the "success" of the hunt, besides the zealousness of men in camouflage (approved weapons: shotguns, bows, pistols, revolvers, and crossbows; Ted Nugent also joined in), is, as one official put it, the sheer naïveté of Florida's wild black-bear population. Having not been hunted in two decades has left the population a bit soft in the stomach. "The bears haven't been hunted in 21 years, so they're relatively naive," said one wildlife official to the Tampa Bay Times. In fact, humans are largely to blame for bears being so "meh" about humans, as another official told National Geographic: "If an animal receives food enough so that it loses its fear of people, becomes used to people [...] Bears did not become this way without people's help."
Activists throughout the state were inflamed by the Fish and Wildlife Commission's decision to authorize the hunt. The commission was flooded with 40,000 public comments and letters during the public comment phase. Nearly 75 percent of respondents pleaded with the commissioners to vote no on the culling. But many sportsmen decried the activism as effete urbanism. As one prominent land developer told the Orlando Sentinel, "They [protesters] can't rule what everybody else wants. The protesters, in my opinion, are the vast minority of people. They're not hunters. They live in the city. They probably wouldn't even want to go out in the woods, you know?"
Groups opposed to the hunt offered simple alternatives to the hunt like trash management and reducing the odors of human food, along with bear-proof receptacles to curb bears from roaming near houses and developments. But that would be no fun for the hunters, said one Central Florida hunter to CBS News, "They do a lot of damage on the property," he said. "It's nice being able to take this one out."
The apparently eager desire to kill bothers conservationists the most. “Florida’s strategy to allegedly reduce human-bear conflicts [through hunting] is predicated upon attracting trophy hunters and it’s akin to a crime control strategy that involves shooting generally into a crowd,” the president of the Humane Society of the United States recently told National Geographic.
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