Maine’s shooting-gallery bears

Aldo Leopold, the father of scientific wildlife management and architect of A Land Ethic, believed that the wildlife manager’s first job was to promote respect for the wild. Maine’s hunting regulations allowing the trapping, hounding and baiting of bears fail that ethical test. Shooting an exhausted, trapped, treed or otherwise cornered bear point blank is considered by most to be an act of supreme disrespect for the wild. However, it is the practice of baiting – training bears to return again and again to piles of garbage and then shooting them as they eat – that turns Maine’s black bears into shooting-gallery targets.

Now we are being asked to trust Maine’s wildlife managers who condone and encourage bear baiting. We are told that these wildlife managers, the commercial hunting guides, and the trophy seekers know best how to handle Maine’s bears. But the sad truth is that the managers know they have abandoned Leopold’s wildlife principles in favor of dollars and trophies. As reported by U.S. News and World Report, baiting bears is “unsportsmanlike conduct” (Nov. 3, 2003).

Rather than promoting respect for wild animals, Maine’s bear feeding program, masquerading as scientific wildlife management, has converted bears into an agricultural crop. Thus, Maine’s wildlife managers have become overseers, and bears have become the ultimate symbol of the taming of the wild: a cash crop, hogs at the trough.

While the agricultural model does generate revenue to pay the salaries of these wildlife farmers, is this the kind of management Maine citizens want for their wild animals? If wildness is to be sacrificed in favor of a commercial crop, why were Maine citizens not consulted? Most important, is this the kind of game management that Maine’s true sportsmen want? Permitting nearly three million pounds of garbage in the Maine woods every year has reduced wildlife managers to garbage managers. It is in no way equivalent to putting a worm on a hook, and they know it.

It wasn’t all that long ago that sportsmen were the elite of the outdoors, of far greater stature than trophy seekers or mere target shooters. Sportsmen were experts who knew the wild and had the mental and physical self-discipline to be comfortable in it. They cherished their hard-won understanding of weather, habitat and wildlife behavior. They didn’t begrudge the hardships and hazards of hunting; they didn’t feel they were owed an easy shot or a guaranteed kill; they didn’t change the wild to fit their own convenience and comfort.

That was also a time when “to hunt” meant more than aligning the sights and squeezing the trigger. Basic to hunting were the skills of the chase: tracking, trailing, stalking and selecting a target. Hunters placed their own shots, based on their own judgments, rather than on the whispered urging of someone who pimps wildlife for a living.

Baiting, hounding and shooting chained or treed bears can hardly be called hunting. These are practices that our wildlife managers should have drawn a line against years ago. Instead, they license these practices to pay their own salaries to oversee the production of an artificially large bear crop. This then allows them and their sporting colleagues to frighten the public with threats of out-of-control bears so they can continue to sell more licenses to bait, trap and hound. This vicious cycle of lies discredits Maine’s wildlife management and dishonors Maine’s sportsmen.

Opponents claim that November’s referendum on bear-hunting methods is about the future of hunting. It is, however, clearly the continuation of these practices, not their abolition, that puts the future of hunting at risk in a society that increasingly values what little wildness we have left.

The bear-hunting referendum is about preserving and respecting the wild. It’s about disallowing the taming of our last bit of wildness for the profit of a few. The voters will either take back what little is left of the wild for all Maine citizens or turn its fate over to that tiny minority of self-styled “sportsmen” who seem to confuse kill with skill.

Maine’s wildlife managers know that there is not one single shred of scientific support for feeding game animals in the wild just to increase the odds of killing them. Where are the Aldo Leopolds of the 21st century? The black bear, the symbol of Maine’s wildness, deserves better than to be treated as a crop, a political pawn, a shooting- gallery target, and a hog at the trough.

Will LaPage is a lifelong hunter and angler, a former two-term member of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Commission, and a member of President Reagan’s Commission on Americans Outdoors.