AUGUSTA – Ten cardboard boxes containing petitions with the signatures of more than 100,000 Mainers who support a referendum to ban bear baiting, trapping and hunting with dogs were turned over to the Secretary of State’s Office with fanfare Wednesday morning.

“This time, it will be Maine citizens who decide this issue,” said Maine Citizens for Fair Bear Hunting director Robert Fisk, who presented the petitions while swamped by a crowd of cameramen.

If approved by voters next November, the referendum would not outlaw bear hunting, but would ban the two practices – shooting over bait, and chasing bear with dogs – that currently account for the vast majority of bears killed in Maine. The referendum also would ban the trapping of bears, with some exceptions for live traps used to relocate bears or conduct biological research.

To place the referendum on the ballot, 50,136 signatures must be certified by the Secretary of State’s Office within a month. Maine Citizens for Fair Bear Hunting had collected the required signatures by Election Day, but continued circulating petitions in order to leave no uncertainty about having enough signatures. The final tally was 103,251 names.

At a press conference held at the State Office Building on Wednesday morning, Fisk and several of his group’s 500 volunteers shared personal stories about why they support the referendum. Most argued that the practice of habituating bears to eat human food that is placed in the woods as bait, then shooting the bear while it feeds, is “unethical” and “cowardly.”

“It’s time for me to follow my conscience and speak the truth,” said Bill Randall, a lifelong hunter from Winthrop who in the past has guided baited bear hunts and once served as leader of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine. “Ethical hunters enjoy hunting where the animals have a chance to get away and are not shot as though it was an assassination,” Randall said.

Leaders of the opposition group, a coalition of hunting organizations led by the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine and by Maine’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Council, attended Wednesday’s event to lobby for their vision of bear management. The council accuses the Humane Society of the United States, a national animal advocacy group working in cooperation with Maine Citizens for Fair Bear Hunting, of seeking to destroy all of Maine’s traditional outdoor sports.

Thus far, more than three-quarters of the funds reported by Maine Citizens for Fair Bear Hunting has come from large national organizations, a fact pointed out by the council in a series of press releases in recent weeks.

However, 46,000 Mainers are members of the Humane Society of the United States, which is comparable to the membership of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, said Anita Coupe of Biddeford Pool, who also serves as vice chairwoman of the national organization’s board of directors.

“I am a Mainer and I am the HSUS,” she said, adding that the group does not seek to end all hunting in Maine, only those practices that Maine people deem “indefensible.”

“We are appalled that it is still legal in Maine to shoot a bear while he or she is gorging on jelly doughnuts and rotting meat parts,” Coupe said.

The Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and Gov. John Baldacci are fighting the referendum, arguing that bear baiting is necessary to keep the bear population from becoming a nuisance.

Cecil Gray, a lifelong hunter and master Maine guide from Bingham, argued against the state biologists Wednesday, citing other states that have banned baiting such as Colorado, Oregon and Washington.

“They do not have the management problems that were predicted by the skeptics, nor do they have bears running wild through the streets eating people at will, as the extremists … love to use in absurd fear tactics,” Gray said.

Maine Citizens for Fair Bear Hunting kicked off its official fund-raising and education campaign Wednesday, with Fisk saying that the group hopes to raise nearly a million dollars. To date, the group has raised just over $180,000, Fisk said.

Maine’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Council is already working within the community, and has raised about $242,000, according to campaign manager Edie Leary.