The grizzly bear debate
Should grizzly bears be hunted? Involving the public in data collection could provide more insight.
B.C. has banned grizzly hunting, and, as is all too common, this has led to confrontational thinking. Hunters say, “There’s plenty grizzlies; it’s all a PETA ploy.” The cabinet minister in charge says, “There are not enough grizzlies to continue a hunt with our current information.”
My view is something like this: People who hunt so they can get bragging rights – “I got me a grizzer” – are narcissistic. I know of one person who shot three grizzlies: two of them had become cattle-killers and were dangerous to people. I think that letting a hunter shoot one of these is better than having wardens do it. In either case, the bear dies. Relocation only works when the bear can be caught and a suitable place found – empty of other grizzlies and with a huge area of suitable habitat.
I think that those who say, “We don’t have enough information” about B.C. grizzly populations are right. But why not involve the public – hunters, farmers and hikers – in collecting data? For example, the grizzly that wanders through our property has probably been doing that for years. I consulted a biologist, who said the grizzly would use the same route every year; that he was about 10 years old and in prime condition. And we didn’t know of his existence until I put up a trail camera.
Elk sightings
When there was a huge kerfuffle about too many elk and not enough information about the actual elk population, a farmer friend of mine and I decided to do something. Hunters and farmers got together to draft a letter to the biologist in charge, offering to conduct a survey of elk population in the area that would be based on visual sightings on one day throughout the region. This would – with possible overlap in the sightings – provide information to help biologists decide whether there should be a hunting season or not. It turned out that there were more elk than a helicopter survey counted.
Meanwhile, on the agricultural front, some money flowed in for farmers and ranchers to make eight-foot “elk fences” around their piles of stored hay and silage. A limited entry hunting season was set up with permits chosen from applications, and – this is the key point – all of it was for private land and required personal contact and permission from the landowner. There was no season on crown land, but Indigenous peoples were free to hunt on crown land that was in their traditional territory. A few years later a general open season for large bull elk was opened in the region.
The grizzly question
What about grizzlies? Are they as rare as it seems? Do we have enough information to know?
I can tell you that one grizzly travels regularly through our farm. A sow with three cubs on a nearby farm about 10 km away was spotted eating barley. And as many as five bears about three km away were grazing with cows on my friend Paul’s property. These are almost certainly all different animals. If the cabinet minister asked us, he’d get one more source for population estimates!
What happens instead is that wardens are called when there is danger to the general population, or when grizzlies attack livestock. After one grizzly had reportedly taken down more than 30 head of cattle, two wardens killed the animal now on display in the Smithers airport. Nicknamed the Phantom Grizzly, he weighed 1,012 pounds, very large for this area. He would have wandered hundreds of kilometres in his lifetime.
Just this spring we had another grizzly pose for a trail camera photo (see photo). He was on our farm; he follows a trail that is protected from development by a conservation covenant. May he live long and keep his nose clean, out of trouble.
