Originally Posted by
MichelD
I get a little tired of the “kill ‘em all” attitude that pops up here now and again about bears.
I’m not opposed to hunting bears. This will be my 44th season doing it, but it gets a little wearying when I see posts like “I saved another moose calf by shooting a bear.”
You want to shoot a bear, go ahead, fill your boots but there are numerous other impacts on deer and moose like huge clear cuts from pine beetle logging, oil and gas pipeline road access, tick infestations, highway and rail mortality, unregulated hunting, the list goes on.
In 52 years of hunting and many hundreds of piles of bear scat observed I have found one with fawn hooves in it. There is no doubt that opportunistic omnivores like bears will eat a fawn, that’s true, but on the other hand, I have seen does with young fawns unmolested in bear-rich areas too.
The bear population gets impacted by unregulated hunting too, the black market for bear parts is still active. I’ve pulled road-killed bears off the road too.
And some licensed hunters aren’t that great at bear recovery either. In 2018 I was on a moose hunt in Region 5 and met a family when the dad was standing on the road bank looking into some nearby trees. “Nope, you missed,” he said back to a young teenager at the truck. “I don’t see any blood.” They didn’t make any more effort to go look.
We had a chat with them over the next week when we bumped into each other and they said that the teenager, trying to get her first bear had shot and “missed” shooting at 10 bears. Well if they didn’t go looking any harder than looking over the bank how did they know?
On the same trip my partner shot a bear at the side of the road. It fled into the bush and when we got to the spot it had been at there was a little scuff mark in the gravel. No hair, no blood, no other tracks. We walked 30 feet into the trees and guess what? Dead bear.
And this anthropocentric attitude that the bears are killing “our” deer and moose is kind of irritating too. Who says they are our deer and moose? A bear has to eat too.