Tag Archives: bears

What We Don’t Know About Bear Hunting

Here’s the travesty of justice the New Jersey bear hunts represent. It begins with the fact that there were no bears left in New Jersey. The Fish and Wildlife Commission imported new bears and encouraged the population to grow so they could sponsor bear hunts a couple of decades later.

The Fish and Wildlife Commission. They’re the people who protect fish and wildlife in the state of New Jersey, right? Nope. They’re the people who make sure people who want to shoot or kill animals and fish have plenty of opportunity to do it: and in the process, they set the forest rangers up to collect beaucoup fees for the privilege of spreading blood and carnage around the forests and damaging the ecosystem of rivers and lakes. That’s done by replacing indigenous populations of fish with farm-bred versions that take over and make many amphibian species native to the area, permanently extinct. A few years ago, the state finally made room on the commission for a single animal rights advocate.

Then there’s the sad fact that baby bears grow pretty slowly, and need their moms for two full years. So yearlings whose mothers have been killed by hunters won’t be able to take care of themselves and they end up dying too before long, of mauling by predators or simple starvation.

There’s plenty about the New Jersey bear hunts that isn’t known, and should be. There must be a better solution to bear population control than the grief and destruction caused through hunting.

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