The Liberal government is going ahead with a six-week spring bear hunt beginning on May 1, the Star has learned.
In an email confirming the hunt, a spokesperson for Premier Kathleen Wynne wrote Saturday that the government has concerns about “public safety and human-bear conflicts.”
The pilot project will be introduced in eight northern communities and final details will be announced soon, wrote Zita Astravas.
The spring hunt for black bears has been controversial since the government announced last November that it was considering a two-year pilot project. Since then conflicting scientific data has been cited by sides for and against the hunt, and at times northerners appeared pitted against southerners.
On its website, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters blames the former Conservative government for caving into “pressure from big city animal rights extremists” in cancelling the spring hunt in 1999.
Critics of the spring hunts, set for 2014 and 2015, say they will result in the slow starvation of nursing bear cubs orphaned when their mothers are killed. Female bears are ravenous after hibernation and hide their cubs in the bush while they search for food.
Natural Resources Minister David Orazietti, from Sault Ste. Marie, told the Star it’s illegal to kill female bears in the spring — only males may be hunted. He said his department is reviewing fines and penalties for killing a female.
“We’re trying to take a thoughtful approach,” said Orazietti.
He stressed that if the public in northern Ontario doesn’t feel safe — “and this is a matter of public safety” — then it’s up to the government to take action. In some northern communities, teachers accompany children with bear whistles at recess, he said, and “this is unacceptable.”
Environmental groups were taken off guard by last November’s announcement. Just three months previously Orazietti had said the spring hunt wouldn’t be reinstated, saying the 1999 cancellation hadn’t led to an increase in bears and that numbers of “nuisance bears” in the north were “relatively stable,” depending on factors as such weather and food supplies.
In 1999, John Snobelen, natural resources minister at the time, said the government, in cancelling the spring hunt, “would not tolerate cubs being orphaned by hunters mistakenly shooting mother bears … Stopping the hunt is the only protection for the animals.”
The fall hunt was extended to compensate for the spring cancellation.
Opponents of the hunt recently sent a petition with nearly 100,000 signatures to Wynne. It urged her not to reinstate the hunt, saying her own ministry had estimated that about 274 cubs died annually before its cancellation.
Mark Ryckman, senior wildlife biologist for the hunters and anglers federation, disputes that number. He said “bear baiting”— a practice whereby hunters leave out food for bears day after day and then shoot them at that spot — allows hunters more time to determine the gender of animals coming regularly to the site.
Mike McIntosh, who heads the Bear With Us animal sanctuary near Haliburton, Ont., says it’s ludicrous to think hunters can tell male bears from female, especially with their shaggy winter coats. He called it “shameful” to hunt bears in the spring because they have the slowest rate of reproduction among any animal in North America.
“These cubs slowly and painfully starve to death,” said McIntosh.
On its website, the hunting federation supports the spring hunt: “For the individual spring bear hunter, the hunt provided opportunities in the spring of the year to renew their primary role as ‘man the hunter’ and thereafter be rewarded with the riches of the hunting experience.”
Jim Johnston, a former hunter who heads the Bear Wise program in Elliot Lake, calls bear-baiting “unethical and hardly sporting.” The government launched Bear Wise in 2004 to educate people about bears and to focus on ways to prevent interaction, such as cleaning up garbage.
He says it’s been successful in Elliot Lake and the spring hunt is being reintroduced because of “inaccurate and unsupported information” about interactions with bears. In communities where it’s failed, he blames a lack of commitment to a program.
The Wynne government invited the public to participate in the decision under the province’s Environment Bill of Rights. Spokesperson Astravas said there were 13,479 responses by the March 7 deadline and that, “generally speaking,” over 50 per cent of the individual responses” were supportive of the spring hunt.
“So we are moving forward,” she said.
Of the anti-hunt petition, she said: “Petitions are one of many ways that Ontarians are able to express their views.”
The controversy may not be over. Julie Woodyer, campaigns director for Zoocheck Canada, said, “We are talking to our attorney over legal mechanisms that will stop the hunt.”
She said the animal protection group doesn’t want to see bear cubs “sacrificed as political pawns.”
After the hunt was cancelled in 1999, the reporting of human-bear interactions rose.
A 2010 study by Natural Resources Department scientists said there was “no evidence that the spring hunt cancellation caused the perceived increases in the bear population or in human-bear conflicts” and suggested a change in the reporting rate for human-bear interactions was “a more plausible explanation for the increase in complaints.”
Said the study: “Residents of Ontario may have accepted the explanation proposed by opponents of the spring hunt and often quoted and repeated in the media: that both the bear population and the probability of dangerous encounters would increase (when the hunt ended).”