September and the Bear Huggers Cometh

You always know when the calendar turns to September. The local paper prints the announcement from the Department of Natural Resources on the guidelines to enter the lottery for permits to hunt black bears. No one pays much mind to this article, it’s printed in the back section of the paper with the obituaries, classified ads, , the comics, and high school sports.

After the signup period ends, in tall, bold letters on the front page of the paper we see, “3300 apply for 220 permits”. The next day or two the letters start. All the locals can quote these letters. Only the names ever change, no the content. “Poor little shy bears that never harm anyone, and the big bad hunters only want a trophy for the wall or a rug for the floor.”

These letters always, and I do mean always, come from a person living in the city that comes to the area a few times a year to visit their “vacation” home on “the lake”. They live in places like Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, PA, or other places where they don’t live with the bears on a day in day out basis.

They don’t hear the news stories about bear that killed a youngster’s 4-H project steer, ran off the family’s other cattle, and then tried to break into the house, or any of the other stories about bears following a scent of something they wanted to eat and broke windows or mutilated doors. They don’t see the damage to farmer’s crops, loss of young animals because they are easy to kill, or any of the other damages that too many animals in too small a place cause.

For some reason, the people who live in the city seemed to think that we who live with bears day in and day out are too ignorant to know how to live with them. They rehash the same things every year about how “if we only use ‘bear proof trashcans’ than we can “all just get along”.

Our local delegate to the state government suggested that if the city people loved the bears so much that we would be more than willing to round a few up to send to live in their manicured suburbs. This immediately brought screams of “Not In My Backyard!”.

Reading this you would think that I hate bears. That is the furthest thing from the truth. I think they are beautiful animals, and have sacrificed several bird feeders to them. Over the years, we have cohabited somewhat peacefully with several different bears. They only visit every few weeks, are careful in how they pull apart my bird feeders, if I happen to forget to put them in the house, and have not reaked havoc in the vegetable garden.

That being said, we live in a rural area where hunting is a way of life. The state was looking for another income stream when they re-introduced bears to this area, they didn’t do it to “rebalance nature” or any other altruistic reason. The hunters have to buy licenses, guns, proper clothing, all the other whistles and bells they believe they need. I know people who have spent $10,000 on one dog trained to track bears. The local area benefits from money spent on room rentals, restaurants, bars, gas stations, and so on and so forth.

So begins the yearly dance between the locals and the out of town “lake people”.

This photo was taken out our dining room window on a Sunday afternoon.