WARNING, this may be offensive to some people!
Gatehouse asked if I knew the time that it became illegal in BC to bait bears. I don't know the exact year, but guessing about early 1980s. Prior to about that time virtually no one hunted black bears. Black bears were considered preditory varmits and there was no closed season on them. If you saw one while you were in the bush, it was common to shoot it. I even went out once between Christmas and New Years with a homesteader, who wanted a bear for the fat. This was customary for him to do every year, but on that trip we couldn't find a den. If we had, he would have put burning birch bark down the den, until a sleepy bear came out. He carried the birch bark and I carried my rifle.
The only people I ever knew who baited black bears to shoot, were the bow and arrow shooters. This was a relatively little known sport at that time, so we had to prove ourselves! In the mid 1950s a small group of us with our, usually, semi recurve bows, killed eleven bears one summer. We always baited, or else we would have been lucky to have gotten even one.
Like so many of our game regulations, it had nothing to do with game management that caused the no bait rule. It was the green piece type, anti hunter protesters that constantly raised hell. We heard lots of it even in the 50s from our baiting for archery shooting, but at that time the protestors were ignored. Their constant theme was that baiting bears to coax them in, then shooting them was cowardly, and only carried out by blood thirsty morons. When the politicians figured out there were more protestors to vote, than there were blood thirsty morons, we got the no bait rule.
It is really a very ambiguous rule and next to impossible to fully enforce. The way the rule reads, you could be walking through the bush, spot a bear and shoot it. When you get to the bear you find it was eating at the remains left of a hunters moose kill. You just committed an offence, you shot a bear at bait!
As Gatehouse mentioned, this no baiting rule hasn't put much of a hardship on the grizzly guides. In the fall they will always find some way to circumvent it, while it just happens that a grizzly was accidentally eating some meat! For spring grizzly hunting the outfitters will find some way to attract them. Trappers leave beaver carcasses in piles along a river bank. Guides are often trappers, or else good friends with the trapper in their area! Any one guiding by a fair size river will find many moose floating by. A lot of moose fall through the ice in the winter time, then float down the river in high water, until they get caught up on a sand bar or log jam.
One time, while it was still legal to bait, I was visiting with two trappers, both well known grizzly guides. They were expecting their first hunters in a few days. I asked them right out, did they find a washed up moose, or were they going to have to shoot one? No, one told me, we found a couple of washed up moose in good areas.
