When do we get to whack some bears?
Posted on 12/08/2003 3:48:13 AM PST by Pharmboy
To the pro-hunt residents of northwestern New Jersey, the black bears have become too close, too bold and too dangerous.
The bears, they say, routinely roam backyards and sometimes barge into houses looking for food — usually household garbage, but occasionally pork chops and brownies. The bears wander around playgrounds and bus stops, frightening children. And they have killed pet rabbits, goats and sheep.
To those weary, and wary, of living with black bears, New Jersey's first bear hunt since 1970 is long overdue.
"We do have a definite problem with the bears, and we need to do whatever is necessary to get the problem under control," said Roy Wherry, the police chief in Vernon, a growing rural town that has had many problems with bears.
To members of animal welfare groups and many residents of the towns with bear problems, the six-day hunt scheduled to start today is a sop to hunting and gun advocates.
They argue that black bears are, by nature, docile, nonpredatory, and easily frightened animals. They say people who want a rural lifestyle should learn to adapt to the bears' presence and can minimize conflicts with bears, primarily by putting their garbage in steel cans with lids the bears cannot open.
Foes of the hunt say it will fail to reduce the presence of so-called nuisance bears because they roam woodlands that are near homes and legally off limits to hunters.
"Bears are not a public safety threat in New Jersey, but thousands of bear hunters in our woods are the real danger," said Sue Russell, policy director of a group based in New Jersey called the Center for Animal Protection.
The verbal cross-fire between the two sides intensified as the hunt approached. Rumors began circulating that some zealous foes of the hunt might traipse into the woods with music blaring from boom-boxes to pester hunters and scare off bears.
The state's environmental commissioner, Bradley M. Campbell, cautioned against such confrontations, warning at a press conference that New Jersey has a hunter-harassment law and that state conservation officers, rangers and state troopers would take to the woods to enforce it. Fines range from $100 to $500, he said.
Several of the groups seeking to protect bears from hunters banded together for an 11th-hour legal effort, appealing to both federal and state judges to ban the hunt on environmental grounds in the 31,000-acre New Jersey portion of a national park along the Delaware River, and in state-owned parks and forests. The coalition was at least partly successful in federal court in Washington on Friday. The national park, the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, was ordered closed to bear hunters until at least midday tomorrow.
Although a two-judge state appeals panel refused to bar hunting in state-owned parks and forests, the State Supreme Court said late Friday that it would review any motion to close the parks later in the week if any appeals were filed by noon today. Before the rulings, Mr. Campbell brushed off the potential impact, saying the federal and state parks and forests amounted to only about 100,000 of the 1 million acres in the designated hunting district between Interstates 78 and 287.
As for the weekend storm that left those woodlands full of snow, it could make it easier for hunters to track bears, but harder for them to remove any bears they kill.
Foes took their anti-hunt message to shopping malls and to Gov. James E. McGreevey's office in the State House and his home in Princeton. The Humane Society of the United States said it would give the state $100,000 to promote nonlethal ways of controlling the bear population if the governor stepped in and stopped the hunt, as his predecessor, Christie Whitman, did in 2000.
Mr. McGreevey was not swayed by the money. The anti-hunt groups accused him of hypocrisy, noting that he had called for cancellation of a proposed bear hunt at the start of his campaign for governor in 2000 but is doing nothing to prevent the current hunt.
The governor's office repeated Mr. McGreevey's months-old response to such criticism: He is personally opposed to the hunt but will not interfere with it because he believes it is the best way to deal with the risks the bears pose.
"At this point, I believe the governor recognizes the issue of public safety has to trump personal preferences," Mr. Campbell said.
Groups opposed to the hunt also refocused on a question that has lingered for months: Just how many black bears live in New Jersey? No one, it seems, knows for certain.
Last spring, state wildlife biologists reported the population at 3,278, based on their studies of bear reproductive rates and the home range of individual bears. Black bear experts who analyzed the figures at the state's request early this year called the biologists' figure exaggerated. They said that it was based on flawed studies, and they estimated that the population was closer to 1,350.
Documents accompanying the lawsuit to stop the hunt in the Delaware Water Gap park noted that a different team of state wildlife biologists estimated in 2000 that the state had 1,000 black bears and predicted then that the number would grow to 2,000 by 2006.
Mr. Campbell acknowledged the uncertainty about the numbers in a press conference last week. He said his staff's "working assumption" now is that the state's bear population ranges between 2,000 and 3,000.
Hunt critics say the size of the population is an important issue. If the true number of bears is closer to 1,300 and too many are killed this week, the recovery of the bear population could be seriously harmed. Regular hunting seasons in the 1950's and 1960's nearly wiped out black bears in the state, leading to the cancellation of bear hunting in 1970.
The state has not set a kill quota for the new hunt. But Mr. Campbell said last week that he would cancel the hunt at any point in its six-day schedule if he believed that an excessive number of bears had been killed.
In recent days, Mr. Campbell has tried to counter arguments against the planned hunt by citing support for it. Last week, his office released letters from environmental officials in New York and Pennsylvania that praised the hunt. The letters said that New Jersey bears routinely roam into those states, adding to the problems posed by native bears. New Jersey's hunt will help bear-management programs in New York's and Pennsylvania, the letters said.
Late last month, Mr. Campbell invited reporters to his office to interview some northwestern New Jersey residents and officials eager for a bear reduction.
Kari Civitan of Frankford said she routinely sees three to five bears a day in her yard and automatically sets off her car alarm to scare them before leaving home to drive to the supermarket. Bill Shelton, the superintendent of schools in Stillwater, a little town with plenty of bears, said school officials had tried all the recommended ways of keeping bears from school garbage bins. They include putting locks and chains on the lids of Dumpsters and pouring ammonia inside, blasting air horns at bears and calling the police to shoot rubber pellets at them. But nothing has worked. "They keep coming back," he said.
Chief Wherry of Vernon said some schoolchildren had begun carrying bagged lunches in their hands instead of in their backpacks. "If they do encounter a bear," he said, "they can throw them their lunch."
Bad idea.
Brilliant. Now the bears will learn to approach school children. One will be killed and the"animal rights" wackjobs will be sucking roasted tofu coffee saying "Who? Us?"
lets just dart about 50 of them, unload a few dump trucks of garbage in their back yards, release the bears there and turn on the cameras. It would make great pay-per-view.
TLI
When do we get to whack some bears?
I get sick of hearing these animalnazis who say "We're encroaching on the bears". BS. There have been no more than a half dozen houses built in this area for 10+ years. There have been no new roads. There have however been constant and frequent problems with the damn bears. Every year for the past five it's gotten worse. 2002/2003 has had 7 or so bears killed either on breakins or on the highways just within about a 10 mile radius of my house. I lose track anymore as it's so common it's bearly newsworthy(pun intentional, heh).
SYNOPSIS Permits use of deadly force against black bears in certain cases.
And your stand on ABORTION is what?
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