SPRING IS THE SICKEST TIME TO HUNT BEARS
This article contains excerpts from Jim’s book, Exposing the Big Game
Unless you’ve been out of the woods too long, you probably already know that black bears across most of North America hibernate for the cold, dark winter months and wake up hungry and ready to get back to the business of being a bear come Spring. And it’s fairly common knowledge that a “sow” will den with her newborn cubs and bring them out when she emerges from her long winter’s nap.
But what a lot of people would be surprised (disgusted, appalled) to know is that hunters in several backwards Western states make sport of hunting bears in the springtime, rather than waiting for fall when bears are not so bleary-eyed and are a bit more wary of the dangers they or their cubs may face around the next bend in the trail—and when maybe they’ve had a few good meals under their belts. Sows often see to it that their cubs are safely up a tree before they go off after nourishment of their own. Not knowing (or caring) that a bear has her young hidden nearby, spring bear hunters are notorious for turning dependent young cubs into starving orphans in the name of their sport, sausage, trophy, or rug.
This is not at all to say that fall bear hunting is fair or humane. To the bears and those of us who care about them, it’s cold-blooded murder, plain and simple. But compared to spring bear hunts, well, almost nothing is more twisted than that, except perhaps, bear baiting, hound hunting, or trapping. Washington residents and a coalition of wildlife advocates testified at a Wildlife Commission meeting this winter via zoom, resulting in a stay of execution for bears this spring and a decision not to make spring bear hunts permanent atrocities in the state.
Though representatives of Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife must pride themselves in their Vulcan-like vacuousness when it comes to non-human animal issues, some com- missioners seem to have been able to relate to sentiments like the follow- ing, printed in Spokane’s Spokesman-Review on March 13th by Samantha Bruegger: “I admit I have an ‘emotional’ reaction to the killing of ‘Mama Bears’ and the orphaning of their cubs. I don’t apologize for that. The ability to empathize with others, including other species, is part of our humanity.”
That of course is using the term “humanity” in the positive sense, rather than the epithet that it becomes when people decide it’s acceptable to bait, hound, and otherwise destroy our fellow animals in the Spring, Summer, Fall, or sometimes even Winter (in places like Alaska, where killing hibernating bears in their dens is legal and where eradication of non-humans to eliminate the competition is a primary motive). Not surprisingly, Alaska is one of the crazy-eight states that still allows spring bear hunting. The other states include Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona.
The more you learn about what offenses are committed against non-human animals, the more you, as a self-respecting non-hunter, should be inspired to take the next step in your evolution away from exploitation. My own anti-hunting stance crystallized over 25 years of living close to nature in prime wildlife habitat, adjacent to a wilderness area in Washington’s North Cascades mountain range. With a loyal dog and two horses for companionship, I made my home in a rustic cabin beyond power, phone, or mailbox. My neighbors were deer, coyotes, snowshoe hares, bears, cougars, ravens, and occasionally, moose, elk, wolves, or wolverine. Steller’s jays, gray jays, juncos, nuthatches, chickadees, pine siskins, several species of woodpeckers, squirrels, and chipmunks were regular visitors to my feeders. At night, flying squirrels clocked-in for their shift at the bird feeders while owls called from the cottonwoods. Muskrats, wood ducks, and Canada geese found food and shelter in the local beavers’ ponds. And if I stayed away from the cabin too long, chances were good that an ermine or bushy-tailed wood rat would take up temporary residence.
For all the years I was out in the heart of this “sportsman’s paradise,” I never succumbed to the lure of “living off the land” at the expense of the local wildlife. Wild animals are my friends, and I don’t make a habit of killing and eating my friends.
Unfortunately, the few people who drove out my way were usually up to no good: road hunting, poaching, or prowling around for signs of critters to harass in the up-coming hunting season. When recreational fur-trappers, hound-hunters, and bear-baiters started operating in the area, rather than taking part in the ‘fun,’ I again sided with my animal friends and did whatever I could to be of hindrance, ultimately joining the successful voter-initiative campaigns to ban trapping, hound-hunting and bear-baiting in Washington State.
Through the generations, bear tales have been told, embellished upon, amplified, and retold by people wanting to justify cruelty to those they fear. But, technologically untouchable consummate killing machines, hunters—outfitted with bows, rifles, and shotguns, riding triumphantly astride four-wheelers—are unrivaled in terms of their destructive force. Meanwhile, bears must rely on their natural faculties when forced to defend their territory, their lives, or the lives of their young—virtually the only times bears resort to violence. Patience and restraint, two characteristics sadly lacking in most humans, symbolize the true nature of the ursine order.
Indeed, a “legal” attack on a bear by a weapon-wielding human is about as honorable as a paranoid superpower leveling the mythically gentle, stone-aged Tasaday tribe with an H-bomb, while branding them the hostile ones. No doubt bears are proud, powerful animals who deserve respect and warrant a dose of caution, but their reputation as a menace is far out of proportion with reality. While bears (including grizzlies) might be responsible for the deaths of one or two North Americans annually, 50 people die from being stung by wasps, 70 are fatally struck by lightning, and 300 will be shot to death in hunting accidents.
My closest human neighbor lived two miles downriver, at a junction where the road turns to gravel and heads up into the national forest. This junction marked the last point where the county snowplow cleared the average five feet of snow that piled up throughout the winter. From there to the cabin, my carbon footprint was a pair of cross-country ski tracks.
Life was good for this peace-loving student of nature, and I was as content as a clam at high tide in the isolation from the maddening throngs. But, things went sour after the Forest Service “developed” the area by putting in a snowmobile snow park just down the road and the county began plowing to within half a mile of my cabin. The road past my place then became a groomed snowmobile playground when it was covered with snow in the winter.
Clearly, the hunting of bears is just some sort of warped game, motivated by a lecherous desire to make trophies of their heads and hides. But, dangerous and terrifying as bears must seem for big game hunters out to prove their manhood from behind the security blanket of a loaded rifle, they aren’t the “most dangerous game,” as the serial killer, Zodiac—an avid hunter who grew bored with lesser prey and advanced to hunting humans—would attest.
As the late Charlie Russell, author of Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka, observed, “Hunting guides describe bears as ferocious, unpredictable and savage predators. They tell one horrifying story after another about people being torn apart. The victims are always those who approached the encounter poorly armed. Then the guides move on to recount countless acts of sportsman bravery: tales of real men stopping huge angry bears just short of the barrel of their guns. They keep it up until their clients are shaking in their boots, barely able to muster the courage to face the dreadful foe.”
An irrational fear of bears dates back to the earliest days of American history, when Daniel Boone (that guy who went around with a rotting raccoon on his head)—like Buffalo Bill, with Bison— was on a mission to make a name for himself by racking up the biggest ursine body count. The bears Boone killed (and there were many) in North Carolina and Tennessee were members of a uniquely North American species which, like coyotes, evolved here on the Western Hemisphere.
Springtime is an especially devious time of year to be ending an animal’s life, yet spring hunting seasons seem to be gaining popularity among unscrupulous hunters practically everywhere. Spring is when “Tom” turkeys are looking for mates, and in states like Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, etc., and it’s the time for camo-clad sport hunters to try to lure them in with turkey calls that sound like a receptive female. (Predictably, more than a few turkey hunters have met their ends when their over-eager, fellow hunters fired away in response to the convincing camouflage and turkey calls.)
Hunters and their supporters are quick to point out anything they do that might seem helpful to the animals (always the species they want to target). But applauding hunters for their environmental efforts, while ignoring the deadly results of their primal passions, can be likened to praising pedophilic priests for sheltering homeless choirboys while ignoring their true motive for spending time with youngsters. Turning a blind eye to “conservationist” hunters’ offenses against animals is akin to discounting Ted Bundy’s selfish crimes against women just because he volunteered some of his time on a rape crisis hotline. Like a covetous child molester, the hunter preys on the defenseless, and like a serial killer, he leaves his victims emotionally scarred and physically wounded, or, preferably, dead
Hunters’ so-called wildlife conservation ethic exists only so animals can be “harvested” again and again. Hunters live for the day they can register a record-breaking trophy with the Boone & Crocket Club–a group formed by Teddy Roosevelt “to promote manly sport with rifles.” Teddy Roosevelt didn’t mind calling hunting a “sport,” but some of today’s wildlife-slayers are getting a bit more politically savvy, as they choke down the unpalatable “harvests,” calling it “subsistence” to try to justify the murder.
Spring for black bears should be a time for reawakening, birthing, and filling their empty bellies. Unlike polar bears, they are not strict carnivores living on a barren, ice floe habitat. American black bears live down in the land of plenty, preferring to forage on foliage or flowers while keeping peacefully to themselves.
Some hunters may have been fearing a meat shortage, since so many workers in slaughterhouses and packing plants were coming down with Coronavirus, but that has never translated to empty shelves at the grocery stores. If anything, the price for flesh-foods went down during the crisis. Far be it from the federal government to subsidize Beyond Meat or some other plant-based, high protein “meat” items out there that hungry people could learn to eat.
But, rather than being consistent with people’s need to stay home and stay safe, hunting is being billed as an essential (if not sacred) activity that hardware, grocery stores and gas stations should stay open to supply. The often inaccurate tests take time and Covid-19 takes 2 weeks for symptoms to show, so we don’t yet know how many people caught it while on hunting or fishing forays. But one thing is certain—no-one needs to get sprayed with lead from a recreational shotgun blast at a time like this, when so many others are taking up necessary hospital beds.
Jim Robertson is the President of C.A.S.H. and the author of Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport