Time for fair bear hunts
State ought to ban the use of baiting and hounds
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Between now and November, Maine Citizens for Fair Bear Hunting will collect over 50,000 signatures from voters to place a petition on the 2004 ballot that would ban the use of bait or hounds to hunt black bears.
The Sportsman's Alliance of Maine says the initiative is the first step on a slippery slope to prohibit all hunting. Nothing could be further from the truth. This has nothing to do with banning hunting. It has everything to do with pride, field craft, hunting skill, and Maine traditions.
Most ethical Maine hunters —and I consider myself to be one — think the use of bait and dogs is unsportsmanlike. Like most states, our laws don't allow us to bait deer or moose or chase them with packs of radio-collared dogs. The same fair chase standards should apply to bears. Where's the sport in shooting a bear with its head in a pile of food, or chasing an exhausted animal up a tree with a pack of hounds equipped with radio collars, and blasting him when he's trapped like a fish in a barrel?
Bear hunting in Maine used to be pretty much a homegrown, amateur affair and there wasn't much money to be made from it. Then, about 20 years ago, the commercial guides smelled profits and began marketing bears to out-of-state hunters. They practically guaranteed a trophy animal by setting up bait stations and placing the "hunter" in front of the site.
Dumping animal carcasses, jelly doughnuts, pizza, grease and rotting fruits in a 55-gallon drum and shooting a bear while he's dining isn't hunting in any sense of the word. Now 80 percent of bears shot in Maine are killed like this by out-of-state gunners.
Except for lazy or slob shooters, baiting or hounding isn't necessary to take a trophy bear. Twenty-seven states allow bear hunting but only nine allow baiting. Major hunting states like Montana and Pennsylvania run fine bear hunts and they don't have baiting and hounding. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado voters approved ballot measures to ban garbage and dogs and their annual bear kills didn't decrease, proving that unsporting methods aren't needed for success. Next year, Maine voters will be asked to do the same thing.
Interestingly enough, the number of people who took up bear hunting in these three states tripled after the baiting and hounding bans went into effect. The bigger demand for bear hunting licenses generated new revenue for the fish and game agencies — $400,000 a year in Oregon, for example.
After Colorado restricted its bear hunt methods, the state Division of Wildlife wrote, "The passage of the 1992 initiative has had no detectable adverse effects on bear hunting or bear management in Colorado. It has shown clearly that a black bear population can be efficiently and effectively managed without recourse to bait, hounds, or a spring season."
Baiting isn't needed to control bear populations, and it creates management problems. Outfitters feed different bears for months, and their clients generally kill only trophy animals. At the end of the season, bears not taken become nuisance animals, accustomed to a garbage feast. They look for easy meals and break into tents, cars, homes, and dumps in search of more goodies. People and property are threatened, and the bears often killed.
Just before leaving office last year, former Minnesota governor and outdoorsman Jesse Ventura was asked for his thoughts on baiting. He was disdainful. "Going out there and putting jelly doughnuts down and Yogi comes up and sits there and thinks he's found the mother lode for five days in a row — and then you back-shoot him from a tree? ...That ain't sport — that's an assassination."
Ventura is right. I urge my fellow ethical hunters not to be stampeded by the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine and by commercial hunting guides into opposing an initiative that seeks to establish responsible hunting standards. Support the initiative to ban cruel and unsporting bear hunting methods.
Richard Smith an avid hunter who lives in Brunswick.