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I respectfully differ in opinion on this
Posted by bushrat on Feb 01 2006
Hey BRWNBR,
Man, it would really help if I knew people's first name to reply to...your "handle" is BRWNBR, and here we are talking about brown bears/grizz...I find it rather ironic in a way.
You quoted the part of the IBA letter about the proposed reg changes, like hunting of female brown bears with dependent yearlings, baiting of brown bears, etc, and then said this: "I really belive there are very very few hunters in alaska who support any of these methods."
I think a fair amount (a majority even) of AK hunters supported the baiting of brown bears as part of the pred-control program in 20E. Note that this "baiting" is still called "hunting" and not just "shooting" as the aerial program should be called. This baiting program was designed to get "hunters" out in the field to take more grizz. I think if we did a poll here you'd be suprised at the results of how many hunters would support some of those methods in the IBA letter as part of a management or pred-control program.
What I've found out from reading up on bears in the management reports and talking with bios (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that interior-Alaska grizzlies can be very efficient predators of moose and/or caribou calvees in spring. (So can boar black bears)
Some bears "learn" to prey on calves in spring and actually "depend" on this resource. They just get good at hunting calves, and knowing where they may be. (Grizz---especially sows---have stable home ranges, however, so you won't get a sow traveling outside her home range to prey on caribou calves...the ones who prey on caribou generally live within the caribou calving grounds). Yet some bears may never kill a calf. So if you kill off a certain percentage of the population of bears, you never know if you're killing the ones who prey on calves or not. It's a spin of the roulette wheel, really. Only way to make sure of the odds is to kill more than half the bears...which is what so many are realizing...and hence the drastic bear-control plans to take 60% of a population.
Semantics also gets in the way. You aren't in favor of "bounties" for instance, but are in favor of legalizing the sale of grizzly bear hides/claws so hunters have an "incentive" to get out there and kill the bears. Incentive. Bounty. Here's the definition of "bounty":
"A reward, inducement, or payment, especially one given by a government for acts deemed beneficial to the state, such as killing predatory animals...."
If there needs to be an incentive to harvesting bears, as you say, then by all means this new program is that incentive...er bounty <grin>.
Hey, not meaning to give you a hard time. I just think this bears (no pun intended) closer examination and dialogue. In the future of Alaska'a Intensive Management Law, we'll probably be offering an incentive to people so they can kill more antlerless moose because there will just be too many moose overbrowsing their range and causing habitat destruction. Who knows.
With respect,
Mark
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