Bear hunt factions raise $2.2M Referendum partisans trade accusations

AUGUSTA – The final campaign finance reports of the election season reveal that in excess of $2.2 million has been raised on the debate over whether Maine should ban bear baiting, trapping and hunting with dogs.

With just five days to go before Mainers decide the referendum issue at the ballot box, leaders from both sides held dueling press conferences Thursday and traded accusations of using these millions to spread lies to the public.

Maine’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Council, a coalition of groups united to oppose the referendum, held a press conference Thursday morning at the State House to reiterate accusations that big donations in support of the ban from out of state are evidence that the referendum campaign is being thrust upon Mainers by outside organizations.

During the first week of October alone, pro-referendum Maine Citizens for Fair Bear Hunting received more than a half-million dollars from the Humane Society of the United States and the Fund for Animals, making the two groups by far the largest donors, according to campaign finance reports filed Wednesday.

Bob Fisk, spokesman for the referendum, said during an afternoon press event at his Falmouth headquarters that last-minute support from like-minded national groups was necessary to compete with his better-funded rivals. The coalition also has benefited from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s unreported contributions of time and effort, he said.

As of Oct. 21, the end of the final reporting period, Fisk’s group had raised $921,949 and spent $879,452. Leary’s group had raised $1,290,477 and spent $1,258,278, according to the financial reports. Hunters for Fair Bear Hunting, a smaller group aligned with Fisk’s, had raised $10,343 and spent $7,236.

Both of the larger groups have received donations of tens of thousands of dollars apiece from national corporate and nonprofit groups, as well as many smaller donations from out-of-state residents.

Earlier this month, Edie Leary, a spokeswoman for the coalition opposing the referendum, had asked the state’s ethics commission to look into the possibility that her rivals had failed to report donations from large interest groups, but she conceded Thursday that this week’s report appears to meet the letter of the law with regard to financial reporting.

Leary all but accused Fisk of attempting to hide the donations by timing them for just days after the last finance reporting period closed. She said Fisk must have known about the large donations when he told reporters in early October he didn’t know how ads were being paid for.

“The allegation is that it’s unethical and that they lied,” she said.

Fisk, too, used the l-word when discussing the coalition’s newest television advertisement, which started running on Monday. The ad uses an audio recording from a home video taken in Aroostook County this summer of a bear preying on a moose calf. In the advertisement, a female voice is heard speaking of the bear attacking a “baby.” Although text on the screen explains that the voice is referring to an attack on a moose, the words “moose” and “calf” are never uttered, and no images of the incident are shown. Leary feared that the video would be too graphic, she said.

Fisk on Thursday asked television stations to pull the ad and sent a letter asking the attorney general to intervene. A previous effort by Fisk to get stations to pull advertisements in which a state biologist advocates against the referendum has not been successful, but he has hope that station managers agree with him that the “baby” ad is deceptive, he said.

“I’m disgusted with this continuous and manipulative effort to scare the voter,” Fisk said, adding that no one in Maine has ever been killed or seriously injured by a bear.

Leary said her campaign believed it had to produce a more “emotional” ad to compete with Fisk’s spots depicting a trapped bear being shot at close range.

She, too, has asked television stations to pull advertisements created by her opponents, and with much more success. NBC and CBS affiliates in Bangor and Portland have stopped running a spot that shows several seconds of a bear bellowing as it struggles to free itself from a trap, before showing the bear shot and dying, calling it offensive. As of Thursday afternoon, the ad was still being shown on ABC and FOX stations, Fisk said.

Both groups defended their respective ads Thursday, saying that the shocking content is necessary in making their point to voters – on Fisk’s side, the brutality of the hunting practices the referendum seeks to ban; on Leary’s side, that bears are dangerous animals.