Suprised noone has made the obvious correlation to this...
June 1999 - Ontario bans the Spring Bear Hunt
With close to two decades of no Spring hunt the Ontario Bear population has increased ten-fold.
Caving to political pressure by animal rights activists, that the so called Spring Season was leaving motherless cubs to die and hunters were not there for the meat, just a trophy photo, hide or skull the Province imposed its Spring ban.
Nothing could be further from the truth on the above. The province didn't look at or care to look at the revenue generated by the spring hunt, not only by residential hunters, but non-residents who were predominately our neighbours to the South (US Citizens). They essentially turned a guiding/lodging industry, small business and peoples livelyhoods into a non-existant void in one fell swoop.
Having said all that, those same animal rights/activist groups did not know that Boars would/will kill more Cubs than their supposed argument on a yearly basis just to put a Sow back into heat and breed her. The data from biologists supports this NA wide, but was swept under the carpet when presented by Hunters and biologists to the province and to some extent the MNR.
Nope, they had no clue of any of that because they had been too Disney'fied by Baloo, worried about Winnie the Pooh or too enamoured by some Nat Geo Show on how cute and cuddly they were while they sat in a river chomping on some Salmon, they couldn't see beyond all of that and actually think there maybe long term effects by banning the Spring Hunt in the form of increased population and human interaction.
So with 20yrs of being the Apex Predator in the province and only so much real estate to go around, no form of population control through a spring season (wait that actually works?!) what essentially was an animal of Central to Northern Ontario, has now become an animal of all over Ontario.
Here's the next dilemma the same Animal Rights activists didn't think about
Once a Bear realizes finding food amongst us humans is a lot easier than foraging around in the woods, well he or she can be hard to get rid of. Relocating doesn't work, just costs us taxpayers money. That and a bears' sense of smell is somewhere around 10x better then a dogs, so they'll just wander back to where they were over a timespan. Case in point being numerous instances of "Dump Bears" being ear tagged & relocated only to show back up in a few weeks at the same Dump.
But......Think we have it bad with Bears becoming more common in suburbia?
You just need to take a look at BC's recent Grizzly Ban under the same premise/excuses as above and hear of the increasing encounters they're having. You know it isn't going to bode well at all. Just wait until there's enough close encounters, a few maulings, or god forbid deaths in the suburbs and watch how fast the Grizzly Hunt gets put back into place. It's an accident and lawsuit waiting to happen.
Why? Because bleeding hearts and dollars to political coffers win out over scientific data every time..
