Hunting in the spring is…

Hunting in the spring is particularly unfavourable because it is a time of vulnerability for bears and other animals that have endured winter and lost body mass. Bears are hungry when they come out of hibernation, there are newborns that must be nourished, and mothers are anxious to feed their young. As a result of these concerns, it remains illegal to hunt bear cubs and female bears with cubs.2 However, it is not easy to distinguish a bear’s gender at a distance and often, bear cubs are kept hidden in safety, so it is not always clear if a roaming female has cubs or not.4 Consequently, hunters may unknowingly shoot mother bears, leaving their cubs orphaned and doomed to suffer and die.

The practice of baiting is another contentious subject that has deterred many from the idea of a spring bear hunt. To make an easy shot for hunters, baiting stations are used to attract bears in the spring. But baiting also discourages bears from pursuing natural food sources and increases the likelihood that they will search for nourishment near areas of human establishment.

Most importantly, the return of the spring bear hunt is demonstrative of the persistence of a contradictory relationship between humans and other animals, and the paradoxical way in which we express interest and adoration toward certain non-humans and yet turn to aggression when they impact our preferred ways of life.

We wish to reduce human-bear conflict by means of violent force and yet, we feel obliged to spare mother bears and cubs due to their particularly fragile circumstance. Perhaps we must first address the moral conundrum with which we are faced – are we in fact concerned about bears and their interest in their own lives or are we only concerned as far as their presence serves humans?

Discussions of spring bear hunting in Ontario appear to have ensued without much consideration of solutions that would be in the best interest of both humans and bears. If we as a province made the decision to ban the Spring Bear Hunt in 1999 partly due to its inhumane nature, then it would make sense for us to attempt to resolve human-bear conflict through alternate non-lethal means.