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Here in WA, against the better judgment of anyone at the Game Dept, an animal rights group proposed, and succeeded in winning by state voter initiative, a law banning the use of hounds, traps, or bait for bear and cougar. They advertised on TV and won people's emotions.

As you probably know, without hounds or bait, the rate of success in actually finding and bagging either animal goes WAY down. Last year they opened up bear season to be pretty much all summer and fall in our state forest, just to attempt to mitigate the damage too many bears do to young trees. Our state forest is a working timber crop. The state wants the bears controlled, and in this one case, it's the gullible, easily misled populace, and not the government, who actually screwed up what was good wildlife management here.

Of course, they banned hounds, except to pursue and catch problem bears... trouble is, if you ban hunting with hounds, who's going to go to the trouble of keeping hounds so they're available and ready when needed?

I don't think the ban law will last, I think it can be overruled once the results become a problem.

I remember when the Humane Society of the U.S. sponsored and pushed all the ballot initiatives that banned hunting with hounds and bait (for bears and cougars) out west. I wrote a lot of articles about it.

The HSUS was the primary backer of those ballot initiatives. A lot of people think the HSUS is a good organization that helps cats and dogs, but the truth is they don't do squat for domestic animals. And they finance and lobby for legislation that seeks to outlaw hunting, specific methods of hunting, and end medical research on animals,etc.

Remember right after those laws were passed there was a hiker (a woman) who was mauled to death by a big cat somewhere out there and the animal rights freaks raised a bunch of money for the cat's kittens, whereas they had no sympathy for the woman killed or her children.

Most people today have no exposure to wildlife and nature, so they believe what Disney channel and animal rights activists tell them, that animals are all sweet and pure, and they all dance around in harmony in the forest.

If most people knew what the HSUS and other AR organizations stood for, they'd quit sending them money.