Posted on 12/09/2003 6:59:05 AM PST by presidio9
One day soon we will be reading about a bear sighting in New York City. A Manhattan bear is a distinct possibility, should the prospective rogue prove to be as venturesome as those coyotes who have been observed crossing various bridges into Gotham and dodging late-night taxis on their way toward Central Park. Nor can one rule out an ursine visit to Brooklyn, although this would require a rare Two-Bridge or Bridge-and-Tunnel Bear. No, the initial encounter is most likely to occur in the Bronx, that borough being contiguous with the mainland's Eastern corridor, where the black bear has staged such a remarkable comeback — some biologists estimate the bear population to be as high as 3,300 in northwest New Jersey alone — that the state yesterday opened its first sanctioned bear hunt in 33 years.
I imagine our lone Bronx bear hiding by day in the New York Botanical Garden's Hemlock Grove, one of the few remaining tracts of natural uncut woodland in New York City, and then making a late-night stop at a McDonald's trash bin before finally being drawn — by both scent and sensibility — to the bear enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. His arrival there would reflect the awkwardness of the situation that we and our wild cohabitants in the Eastern United States now find ourselves in: a free-roaming bear staring at the ones we cage in order to best represent their presumably imperiled state.
A deep disquiet attends the solace we take from hearing of the wild's re-emergence within our civil environs: white-tailed deer, coyotes, black bears, even bobcats. Their presence seems, at first, to engender a kind of reprieve, as though we've finally arrived at a truce with our wild counterparts.
The actual story is more complex and less idyllic. With the steady shift over the past century of agriculture to the Midwest and the Plains, along with the replacement of wood heat with coal, oil and gas, the East Coast's forests have, by and large, been allowed to flourish. And within them have returned many of the animals we long ago assumed had been permanently displaced. This change, in tandem with the spread of suburbia into those same reforested regions, has brought two burgeoning populations (animal and human) face to face. And this, of course, is where the trouble begins — where our romanticization of the wild gives way to thornier questions about how best to broker the peace with it.
For some recently restored predators in our midst, the peregrine falcon, for example, the reinstatement process remains an all-around feel-good story. To a falcon — a creature built to hover, both literally and figuratively, above the fray — our most audacious spires provide ideal perches and nesting places. Some of the city's most deeply entrenched and opportunistic wild cohabitants, meanwhile (rats and pigeons), provide the falcon an abundant food source, one an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers are happy to part with.
When it comes to a large, wingless, territorial creature like a bear, however, things quickly become more complicated. A recent study of the black bears living in and around developed parts of the Sierra Nevada has shown that they readily become inveterate garbage pickers. The fast-food trash bin, in fact, has proved to be such a consistent and abundant food source that these bears have stopped hibernating altogether, have switched from their natural daytime hunting schedule to an "after hours" foraging routine, and are now beginning to show signs of obesity. Many have been found by day sleeping off their binges beneath city trees.
In New Jersey, meanwhile, black bear breaking-and-entering incidents have nearly doubled in the last five years, rising to 57 so far in 2003 from 29 in 1998. There has been, as well, a steady surge of nuisance complaints: bears rummaging through campsites, attacking livestock, raiding bird feeders and beehives, and threatening pets. In 1999, police and wildlife officials euthanized four bears; last year, they killed 35. Two attacks on humans were also reported, and though neither resulted in serious injury, state officials finally felt compelled to react.
In July, the New Jersey Fish and Game Council approved a hunt limited to the area roughly defined by Hunterdon, Morris, Passaic, Sussex and Warren Counties, all in the northwest part of the state. The decision was not without controversy. Specialists called in by the state's environmental commissioner were far from unanimous in their support. Some said the rising bear population merited a limited yearly hunt that could be sustained indefinitely. Others argued that the state's bear census was unreliable and that the hunt should be postponed until further studies could be conducted and other options explored. Still, the commissioner ultimately decided to back the council's decision, as did a reluctant Gov. James E. McGreevy, a Democrat who had won the backing of environmental groups in part by promising to protect the state's bears.
Part of the rationale for going ahead with the hunt was that it was better to designate the black bear a game animal than a public nuisance. Otherwise, as one hunt supporter from Millville, N.J., said at a public hearing last summer, the authorities would be pressured to exterminate bears. "Bears will be seen as vermin," she said, "and I don't want to see that. I think it is a magnificent animal."
Killing a wild animal to secure either our safety or sustenance (bear meat has been likened to a somewhat stringy but flavorful steak) could be described as a natural extension of our own territorial instincts. Killing an animal in order to preserve its magnificence, however — to restore it to its idealized status in our minds — somehow seems behavior as cockeyed as that of a Dumpster-drunk bear.
Hunting has become its own kind of endangered species, a long-ago ritualized form of recreation (not to mention a hefty source of state revenue). But as a method of animal-population control and containment it is a shot in the dark. Some wildlife experts and bear biologists who were called in to examine New Jersey's situation noted that the hunt would eliminate only about 500 bears — about as many as were born the previous winter — and therefore make little or no dent in the total population.
It's unclear, too, that by reducing the number of bears we reduce the number of fractious encounters with them. New York State has an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 black bears. Though the state has far more habitat than New Jersey, and 900 black bears were killed in the annual state-sanctioned hunt last year, New York was still the only state in the region to have a fatal bear attack in 2002.
Interestingly, even New Jersey's hunters seem to be expressing ambivalence. The state made 10,000 permits available, but just over 6,000 hunters applied, a response that seems to be attributable, in part, to the high degree of risk involved in stalking bear — as opposed to deer, pheasant or duck — and to the need for the sort of expertise that, after a 33-year hiatus, relatively few sportsmen have. In fact, as part of the application process, the state held mandatory seminars to teach applicants bear hunting techniques.
But why not then make similar efforts to educate nonhunting citizens, especially those who now find themselves living on the front lines with bears? In truth, there aren't a lot of alternatives. Efforts to tranquilize and transport bears were abandoned because no other states wanted them. Chemical castration and contraception is, by all accounts, still years away from viability.
Still, simple gestures on our part can minimize the blurring of bear and human territory. Bear attacks are territorial, not predatory. And the fact is that when left to their own devices, wild bear populations are naturally self-limiting. Females are able to reproduce only when their natural habitat provides enough food. Older males, meanwhile, routinely kill interlopers that invade their territory. But to dissuade those bears that become overly reliant on human food sources, people could learn to keep feeders and garbage bins out of reach. For its part, the state should require bear-proof enclosures around restaurant trash Dumpsters. It should also step up enforcement of a new law that makes the feeding of bears illegal.
As for those bears that prove resistant to all efforts at re-education, selective euthanasia by professional sharpshooters is surely a preferable alternative to the invariably messy exploits of amateur hunters set loose among an indeterminate number of free-roaming bears.
New Jersey had in fact originally set funds for a program intended to enforce the feeding law, to teach residents how to coexist with bears (as millions of people across the United States do daily without incident) and to deal with problem bears through the use of aversive conditioning methods like chasing them with dogs or using pepper spray. The money for that program, however, was cut from the budget two years ago, and the state's department of environmental protection was forced to make do with a much more modest educational campaign.
Civilization has somehow brought us to the point where more humans are living closer to more wild animals than ever before. We have, in a sense, forced ourselves to become naturalists within the very environment we long thought would preclude such a role. Only by being better keepers of our nest can we keep its wild antidote nearby. Only by better marking and tending to the edges of our world can we help the bears hew more closely to theirs: hovering, if not above, then at least safely outside the urban fray.
This is just silly. The only "professional sharpshooters" that are available are cops, and they aren't any more qualified to kill a bear than say, a licensed bear hunter.
It doesn't take a SWAT Team member to cleanly kill a bear. And licensed hunters pay money into the public treasury, they don't draw overtime for doing a job you already have volunteers licensed for.
In order to come close to harvesting the required number of animals, you'd have to have a large staff of shooters employed almost full time at public expense.
Paying them to hunt. I want that job. Pay ME to hunt your black bears, I'm a proven good shot, and it sounds a lot more fun than my day job.
It will be a thinning even as a hunt. The number of bear permits will be limited first by the states harvest goals, and second by the unsuccessful hunters.
Destroying bears after they attack toddlers is like prosecuting the terrorists after they blow up the building. It may feel good in a vindictive sense, but it misses the point. We know what bears do, just like we know what terrorists do. Once bears are comfortable in densely populated areas tragedy is inevitible. They must be preemtively destroyed.
One of the more charming aspects of living in the Bronx is the chance to see wildlife you don't see in the other four boroughs and not just in the Zoo. When I was there, we had skunks, oppossums, chipmunks, "black" grey squirrels, a variety of birds, etc.
In Fairmount Park in PHILADELPHIA, the city had to call in hunters to decrease the deer population that was spilling out onto the streets of the western part of the city.
Well, it would get the social scene in the Ramble under control, anyway...
Zelda, the turkey who took up residence in Battery Park about a year ago.
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