Bear hunting and conservation questions

You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to oppose black bear hunting in Manitoba. You also don’t have to trade in your ethics in order to understand biology. Most animal and nature-loving Canadians can do it all: understand science and care about animal suffering. Well, unless your paycheque requires otherwise.

Such is the case for the author of a recent article for the Free Press (Why claims of sentience can’t guide black bear policy, Think Tank, April 16), Mark Hall, who conservation-washes the killing of black bears in our province. The B.C.-based hunting advocate also conveniently failed to mention his vested interest in the issue, including that the organization he works for is funded by companies in the trophy hunting business. He also failed to follow the actual science.

The fact is, framing Manitoba’s spring black bear hunt as a conservation measure grounded in biology just doesn’t hold up. Especially since it is also marketed by local companies as trophy hunting. “During your bear hunt you will be placed over an active bear bait site (and) with a little patience and some determination you will be able to harvest a trophy of a lifetime,” states one company’s website.

Lesley Fox, executive director of Canadian wildlife protection charity The Fur Bearers, says “heralding the spring bear hunt as conservation is a public relations tactic that supports special interests, not wildlife.”

Conservation, in scientific terms, is based on protecting or restoring ecological systems. Crucially, Canada’s black bear populations are widely considered stable, not overabundant (even declining in Ontario). So the routine killing of a stable population, without any clear ecological benefit, does not meet the standard of conservation.

Also, recent peer-reviewed research has increasingly challenged the idea that killing bears somehow meaningfully reduces human-bear interactions.

For example, a large empirical analysis of black bear management in Hall’s province of B.C. found that lethal control of the animals did not result in any real reduction of human-bear interactions. The researchers pointed instead to the real drivers of the problem: food availability, habitat conditions and human behaviour.

In Manitoba, a recent academic analysis of our spring bear hunt similarly concludes that available data do not show any ecological benefit to the hunt, and that practices such as baiting may even heighten conflict by conditioning bears to associate humans with food.

This all reflects a well-established scientific consensus on human-bear interactions. Research continually shows that these encounters are driven primarily by access to human food — like garbage, bird feeders, farmed animals and fruit trees — not simply because there are “too many” bears.

Once bears learn to exploit these consistent food sources their behaviour changes and they are drawn more routinely into human spaces. “Conservation” responses are too often reactive, relying too often on killing individual animals.

But the literature makes clear that killing individual animals does little to address root causes. “In many cases,” says Fox, “preventing bear encounters, like securing garbage and installing electric fencing to protect farmed animals and crops, works better than killing.” Without that, killing bears simply treats the symptom, not the system, and the cycle continues.

Also, despite what hunter Hall wants Manitobans to believe, sentience, ethics and suffering do matter and feeling empathy for sentient beings doesn’t somehow inhibit one’s ability to understand science.

In fact, as Fox notes, “sentience and the study of animal sentience is science.” And that science is what helps inform laws and policies on animal welfare and humane animal treatment. The Winnipeg Humane Society, for example, states on its website that it “opposes the spring bear hunt and calls for the Government of Manitoba to end this practice.” Because it’s a cruel and unnecessary practice.

“Thousands of studies show animals, of a wide variety of species, have complex emotions and intelligence. You can’t just ignore that because it’s inconvenient,” says Fox. “If you want science, it’s all science.”

And if policy is to be guided by science, the evidence regarding bear hunting in Manitoba asserts that we must focus less on bullets and more on habitat stability, attractant-management and ethical coexistence. There may be no “trophies of a lifetime” in coexistence, but the priority is nature, not profit.

Jessica Scott-Reid is a Winnipeg journalist and animal advocate. She is the culture and disinformation correspondent for Sentient Media and she is on the Winnipeg Humane Society’s Animal Protection Committee.