“Bears are intrinsically…

“Bears are intrinsically social, they need to be social, but our species has not let them do so because of our own profound fear.” ~ Charlie Russell

Even though a criminal charge is in place, Mother bears will be killed during the hunt, leaving their orphaned cubs to starve or be killed by predators. Cubs are born in the spring as well as in the Fall. Already with the fall hunt population decreases, a male bear is still required to produce a cub. Reintroducing the spring hunt will do even greater damage. It renders anonymous all those animals that run for their lives, their hearts filled with panic and their eyes, at times, blurred by real tears. In some cases, whole families perished. Who died first? The mom? Or did she first see her little ones gunned down? Some hear the sounds of a mother crying for her little ones. The memory of the piercing wail never goes away.
But our lives go on uninterrupted; the sound of a shotgun dies out soon.

And if the assurance of “a healthy population” is not enough, then the perennial, all-encompassing claim of “public safety” is dispatched to justify the slaughter. Bears are “destroyed”, because they are “aggressive”, “dangerous”, “food conditioned” and “habituated”. Their very presence in urban areas posed a danger to the public. It is a case of choosing a lesser evil: bears must be killed, so they don’t kill us. To survive, we need to keep our urban habitat free of wild influences; we need to keep “the savage world” at bay.

These are fictitious, self-serving arguments to soothe pangs of conscience. After all, nothing works better than fear-mongering; nothing works better than justifying cruelty as an unfortunate price to pay for ensuring a greater good. But let’s dispense with the falsehoods, just for once. Keeping the public safe? What danger to the public does a bear pose when in their natural home? None, of course. Their deaths prove nothing, except for our capacity for cruelty and indifference.
And what about the notion of so-called “nuisance” or “problem” bears being a danger to the public? Making such a claim would require supporting data, but such data are lacking.

Why do we kill bears, then? As Charlie Russell, a renowned bear expert, argued, our irrational fear of bears sets the stage for antagonistic relations with these animals. Removed from nature by the civilizing process, we live in fear of some of its most magnificent creatures, bears among them. The fear of the unknown magnifies the real danger: “We are the source of food for bears,” “What if is a bear encounters small kids playing on the playground?” “What if someone is mauled or killed?” Indeed, what if, what if, what if. The mind comes up with scenarios and the imagination stokes fears. Irrational ones.
As Lynn Rogers, a researcher who studied black bears for over 50 years, says that most people expect a bear to behave aggressively rather than what a bear ends up doing in reality. In other words, the danger might not be real, but the fear of an non-existent threat persists anyway. And it is this distorted perception of fear that both instigates and justifies the lethal conservation policies.
The psychology of risk perception illuminates the irrationality of our fears. We have an inflated perception of risk when facing situations over which we have little control.

These approaches are the legacy of a hunt, trap and kill mentality. The legacy we can’t free ourselves from. In their book Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age, Mark Bekoff and Jessica Pierce discuss the “knowledge translation gap”. Our adherence to misguided attitudes and practices allows us to justify causing harm to animals, despite the preponderance of science on animal cognition and emotions. They have different types of social behaviour that possibly parallel early human behaviour. They are not solitary, aloof animals, as often portrayed. They have impressively complex social relationships based on alliances formed with other bears and, once rules are established, they can do well in overlapping home ranges. We are bound to co-exist with black bears, and so we owe them to learn about their way of acting when our paths happen to cross. It can be done. “Bears can read our emotional communication [and] it’s not that hard for us to understand how a bear communicates”, Kilham says. Charlie Russell’s decades-long peaceful relationship with bears has proven that. Knowledge, tools, resources are available to us. We need the will.

In the end, we owe bears respect. No bear should die because of a heathy population. There are no “nuisance” bears; there are no “problem” bears. These words are labels of convenience that we use to hide our discomfort with nature.
As a resident of Ontario and as the public I don't consent. In fact remove the bear hunt all together just like they did in 1999.