Garbaging for Bears
If you feed bears because you’re trying to photograph them, you’re likely to get busted. But feeding bears in twelve states and national forests in ten of those states is fine if you’re only trying to kill them.
by Ted Williams
Traditional, fair-chase bear hunting — i.e., tracking bears alone on foot — is way too difficult and time-consuming. Baiting is the only effective way to hunt bears and the only way to meet management objectives designed to prevent bear populations from spiraling out of control and taking over neighborhoods.
I have this from reams of “educational material” disseminated by the 12 states that still permit bear hunting over bait — Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Utah, and, on private land only, Oklahoma and New Jersey. It’s all dutifully recycled by the hook-and-bullet press.
“In order for wildlife biologists to manage bears, there needs to be a way to hunt them to attain appropriate harvest rates,” instructs hunting pundit Jim Zumbo in a piece entitled “Bear Baiting Basics” for Caribou Gear’s website.
“The odds of killing a bear without bait in central Canada or Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan are so low that no DNR would consider a bear season without bait as a viable bear management tool,” proclaims Bernie Barringer in Bear Hunting Magazine.
So, we’re told, bear hunters have no choice but to fill buckets or bags with stale donuts, grease-soaked bread, old candy, scraps of rancid meat, rotten fruit, and any other handy garbage, the smellier the better. “In a normal season we will go through 10 tons of pastries and about 8 tons of meat,’’ reports one baiting guide on a bear-hunting website.
Then, after bears have safely chowed down on the garbage for a few days or weeks — and after mother bears have learned it’s safe to bring their cubs to the smorgasbord — the hunter must recline a few yards away and “harvest” his bear when it sticks its head into the garbage.
“[Outfitter] Brian Bachman’s baiting theory, based on 35 years of experience: ‘Hunters pay me to put them on a stand and I only have a few days and I don’t want to risk putting them on a stand that might not produce for a day or two.’” So effuses Gary Lewis at BearHunting.com about his guided bait hunt in the Superior National Forest, in northern Minnesota.
The Bipartisan Backlash Against Baiting
This week, U.S. Congressman Sri Thanedar (D-Mich) will introduce the Don’t Feed the Bears Act in the U.S. House to forbid bear baiting on federal land. This is just one more indicator of the widespread disgust among hunters and non-hunters for the idea of training bears to eat trash as a way to facilitate an easy kill.
This, for example, from Wayne Pacelle, president and founder of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy:
Some guides even will burn honey to attract their targets from miles around. Others use “walk-in” baits, in which they load up an old horse or mule with food, walk the animal into a forest, shoot him, and then add the carcass to the bait pile. Baiting takes unfair advantage of the survival strategies and life cycle of the black bear. In the fall, bears feed for up to 15 hours a day — a phase known as hyperphagia — to build fat reserves for a long period of dormancy. Baiting exploits their need to feed almost constantly by providing a ready source of food. In some states, the bait can be set out a few weeks before the actual hunting season starts.
Pacelle’s outfit doesn’t oppose fair-chase hunting, a fact stridently denied by many hook-and-bullet writers. According to them, anyone who opposes bear baiting is anti-hunter.
“Animal rights organizations and anti-hunters say it’s unethical, gives hunters an unfair advantage, and doesn’t follow the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,” writes Matt Smythe in Free Range American.
Smythe is spot-on. Animal rights organizations and anti-hunters do say, accurately enough, that bear baiting is “unethical [and] gives hunters an unfair advantage.” And they do say, accurately enough, that bear baiting violates the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, a main tenet of which states that: “Wildlife shall be taken by legal and ethical means, in the spirit of ‘fair chase.’” There’s no “fair chase” if there’s no chase.
What Smythe doesn’t get around to reporting is that most opposition to bear baiting issues not from anti-hunters, animal-rights groups or animal-wellness groups. It issues instead from fair-chase hunters and trained wildlife professionals. My friend Dan Ashe is both.
As director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Obama, Ashe managed America’s 859-million-acre, 570-unit National Wildlife Refuge System. “I have hunted practically as long as I can remember, pursuing small game and waterfowl as well as deer, elk, and caribou,” he told me. “Hunting has been a lifelong passion and helped shape my values as a career wildlife conservation professional. I’ve never hunted bears. I’m not a predator hunter. I think there’s precious little science to support predator hunting. Bear hunting is managing hunters, not bears. And baiting seems contrary to the whole philosophy of sportsmanship. My view is that there’s a mythology that hunters manage game. We don’t manage waterfowl, for instance; we manage the hunting of waterfowl. Some managers procreate this fear of predators: ‘we have to manage bears or they’re going to be knocking at your door.’ I don’t see any evidence that hunting manages bears. If bears are so abundant that they’re problematic, why are they so hard to find?”
Will bears spiral out of control and take over your neighborhood if they’re not shot with their heads in garbage? Well, no. They self-regulate. Like virtually all long-lived animals, bears have low reproductive rates. In most years, fewer than 20 percent of black bear sows give birth. And something like 20 percent of cubs don’t see their second year.
In the late 1980s and early ’90s, when wildlife biologist Tom Beck ran the black bear program for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, he got crosswise with his agency by leading a successful fight to ban bear baiting by ballot initiative.
“How sporting is it to shoot a bear with its head in a bucket of jelly donuts?” inquires Beck. “What aggravates me most,” he told me, “is that wildlife professionals accept the hunters’ claim that bears can’t be hunted without bait. I don’t believe anyone who says you can’t hunt bears in the fall when they’re on berries or nuts. You can predict where they’re going to be, and if you’re a woodsman, all you have to do is scout those places. After we banned baiting in Colorado, it took only two years for our hunters to get to the point where they were killing more bears than they were before. They learned how to do it.”
Colorado outlawed bear baiting in 1992. From 1989 through 1991, state hunters annually killed an average of 471 bears. From 2002 through 2004 they annually killed an average of 656 bears.
“Today’s bait hunters have not developed the woodsmanship skills that are so much a part of the American hunting tradition,” Beck wrote in an editorial assigned him by Stephen Byers, editor-in-chief of Outdoor Life magazine. “Instead, they expound on the comparative merits of rotten fish and honey drippers for pulling bears in, and Twinkies versus Jolly Ranchers for holding bears at the bait site … I firmly believe that baiting creates ‘nuisance’ bears. Black bears are naturally wary, instinctively avoiding close contact with humans. But large amounts of tasty food, easily obtained, defeats this wariness. By baiting, we create lazy bears who have been rewarded, not punished, for overcoming their fear of humans.”
Byers was aberrant among hook-and-bullet editors (especially Outdoor Life editors) in that he was verbally and ecologically literate, consistently demonstrating that hook-and-bullet journalism doesn’t have to be an oxymoron.
Beck’s piece — clearly labeled as an expression of his opinions, not Outdoor Life’s — was prepped for the September 1996 issue. But the Ohio-based Wildlife Legislative Fund of America (it has since renamed itself the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance) got wind of Byers’ plan. Neither it nor anyone outside Outdoor Life’s office doors had laid eyes on Beck’s piece. Still, the Fund decided that it contained facts sportsmen shouldn’t know and opinions sportsmen shouldn’t hear. Accordingly, it sent out an “action alert” instructing sportsmen everywhere to complain to Outdoor Life.
They did. So, at the last possible instant, Outdoor Life’s owner, Times Mirror, spiked the piece. Byers and his assistant editor Will Bourne quit in disgust. “You don’t lose readers by pissing them off,” Byers told me. “You lose readers by boring them.”
When fair-chase hunters complained to Outdoor Life for what Byers accurately calls “gross cowardice in the breach,” Times Mirror caved again, retrieving Beck’s piece and ordering Outdoor Life to run it — but alongside a rambling harangue rife with mythology by a manager from Maine, where baiting was and is legal and encouraged.
Science and Ethics Collide at the Bait Pile
No black bear authority before or since has been more knowledgeable than Dr. Charles Jonkel (1930-2016), who did his Ph.D. research on the ecology and biology of black bears in the spruce-fir forests of western Montana, then co-founded and ran the Great Bear Foundation. He condemned baiting as “unethical” and “unfair.”
Here’s some of Jonkel’s testimony at a hearing on the failed Don’t Feed the Bears Act of 2003, which would have banned bear baiting on federal lands: “Baiting pulls bears from their normal range and may pull bears to sites where they are vulnerable to attack by other bears, other species, parasites, and diseases. Michigan, for example, now has a terrible livestock TB infection, which probably came from the bear- and deer-baiting stations, [and] that is costing that State millions of dollars … I warned the DNR in Michigan that they were liable to cause a major infection that could get into livestock. They ignored it. They have got it now. Baiting causes bears and other species, from insects to shrews, to congregate, creating unnatural food chains, interactions, fights, and predation. Baiting changes each bear’s relationship with other bears and with other species.”
Mixed Messages from Forest Managers
“A fed bear is a dead bear.” That’s the shibboleth of agencies charged with managing bears on both state and federal lands, including lands where bear baiting is permitted. When bears key in on human food, they cause trouble and wind up getting blown away by farmers, ranchers, game wardens, and USDA’s Wildlife Services.
If you feed bears because you’re trying to photograph them, you’re likely to get busted. But feeding bears in 12 states and national forests in 10 of those states is fine if you’re only trying to kill them.
Never condition bears to human food, warns the management establishment. For example, the Superior National Forest distributes a food-storage order “to protect both black bears and humans.” “Visitors,” directs the Forest, “must store food properly, either in a bear canister or bear-resistant container, at least 50 feet from their campsite, or at least 12 feet above the ground. Black bears are common in the Superior National Forest. When food is scarce, bears may take advantage of other food sources, such as trash, compost bins, pet food, and backyard bird feeders. This can lead to more interactions between bears and humans … Keep trash cans in a locked garage or shed.”
And the White Mountain National Forest has this counsel and decree: “Don’t invite bears into your site by leaving food out. Keep food, garbage, coolers, pet food, canned or bottled beverages, and other bear attractants in a hard-sided vehicle, the bear-resistant food lockers provided at several developed sites, or an approved bear-resistant food container. Pack out all trash, leftover food, and litter. Feeding bears, intentional or unintentional [sic], is prohibited!”
Why then do these and other national forests invite bear baiters onto public land, thereby endangering both bears and the public?
The Forest Service used to regulate bear baiting, but during the 1990s it ceded most control to the states. Grizzly bears, protected in the lower 48 under the Endangered Species Act, are attracted to bait sites set for black bears. Few bait hunters can distinguish a grizzly from a black bear. The first grizzly recorded in Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in half a century was killed over bait in 2007.
The Alaska Board of Game even permitted bear baiting on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, land owned by all Americans. This resulted in a loss of 200 of an estimated 600 brown bears in just two years. Dan Ashe, then USFWS director, had the spine to shut it down. “The Alaska Board of Game has unleashed a withering attack on bears and wolves that is wholly at odds with America’s long tradition of ethical, sportsmanlike, fair-chase hunting,” Ashe wrote in the Aug. 3, 2016 Huffington Post. “There comes a time when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must stand up for the authorities and principles that underpin our work and say, ‘no.’”
Bear baiting, especially spring baiting when sows are lactating — still legal in Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah — orphans cubs dependent on mothers. Most orphaned cubs succumb to starvation, exposure or predation. And spring bears, still lethargic from hibernation, are even easier targets for bait hunters
Bear baiting, especially spring baiting when sows are lactating — still legal in Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah — orphans cubs dependent on mothers. Most orphaned cubs succumb to starvation, exposure or predation. And spring bears, still lethargic from hibernation, are even easier targets for bait hunters.
A Firsthand Look at Garbage Hunting
I have been scolded by managers and bear baiters for condemning a method of hunting they say I’ve never experienced. But I have experienced it. In June 1981, Gray’s Sporting Journal, a literate and beautifully illustrated celebration of fair chase for which I still write, sent me to Jackman, Maine, to research bear baiting. (Maine has since restricted bear baiting to fall.)
I was armed only with a camera, but other clients toted high-powered rifles, shotguns, Bowie knives and big-bore handguns. Some had ammo-laden bandoliers draped over their shoulders. All were from out-of-state.
Before we settled into the bait sites, our outfitter, Jack, sat us down for a safety lecture. He held up a pair of underpants that he and I could have simultaneously climbed into. Jack ran his index finger through a hole at the center of a stiff, black circle the size of a frying pan.
The previous owner had ripped himself a new one by practicing his quick draw. “I think I shot myself in the ass,” he moaned to Jack who had noticed him swaying on the dirt road.
“He had a fat ass,” said Jack, superfluously. “I grabbed one of the cheeks and pulled it up and said, ‘Hey, you did shoot yourself in the ass.’”
Jack got a doctor to sew up the new hole, and next morning the guy was back watching a bag of reeking garbage and sitting on pillows. So grateful was the client for the repair job that he asked Jack what he could do for him. Jack said: “You can give me your skivvies for my safety lectures.”
To experience bear baiting I reclined at one of Jack’s bait stations for five hours and 16 minutes, watching garbage with George, an 18-year-old hunter from Paeonian Springs, Virginia. Besides 750,000 black flies, the only wildlife I saw was a red squirrel. George, who only heard it, thought it was “a bear for sure.”
George had saved his money for a dream hunting trip, and all he got to see of the storied north woods was a half-acre around a bag of rotten meat hanging from a tree 80 feet from a dirt road.
Ted Williams, a lifelong hunter, writes exclusively about fish and wildlife. He is a former information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. The state codified a regulatory ban on bear baiting via a ballot measure in 1996.