The Inevitable NJ Black Bear Hunt: Part 2

There have been some comments on my Black Bear Hunt piece on several other forums that I think are worth commenting on. Someone on the nj.com website has said that Black Bears aren’t dangerous because you can simply chase them away. Another maintained that they think there is a big difference between normal bears and “nuisance bears”, and a third felt it was important to just “leave nature alone”. The anonymity of the Internet can be deceiving and all of these people might be 14 year olds. If that’s the case, then they can’t really be blamed for their stupefying and apparently willful blindness to the facts. But since it’s possible that they are really foolish adults, I thought it would serve us all to discuss some of the literal “facts of nature” surrounding the Black Bear in NJ.

Bears are like all other wild animals, they will sooner run than fight, because it involves less risk for them and costs them fewer calories. The only time they ever do any different is in when they are fighting for breeding rights, when they are defending their young, or when they think their own survival is on the line. At present, the black bears in New Jersey still have enough space to run so the number of moments when it thinks it needs to stand and fight are few. But according to the State DEP biologists, the population is growing rapidly. That means that very soon there will be many more bears. And a bear population that’s growing combined with a habitat that isn’t, means that there will be more direct contact between bears and humans. This isn’t my opinion or pro-hunting political posturing; this is simply mathematics.

For now, this is still probably fine. The animal rights crowd will continue to talk about how the bears need to be protected from people and CBS news will run occasional footage of some adorable bear cub splashing around in someone’s pool in Saddle Brook. But every autumn when their food starts to get scarce we’ll see a few more bears breaking into people’s kitchens, and hear about them being hit more often by cars. We’ll hear more stories from our friends and neighbors about how their garbage cans were destroyed or how their pets are disappearing.

And that will happen because out in nature, times will be getting tougher. More bears means more competition between them for food and space. And more competition will mean more desperation on the part of those bears whose survival used to be easy. It’s that desperation that’s going to make them more dangerous, and not just some ill mannered “nuisance bears” but all of them. With no checks on them, their population will expand to the size of their available habitat and then they will begin to encroach on “human territory” as well.

Bears don’t generally like to be around people because we too are large, potentially dangerous animals and just being near us increases their risk of survival. Most of us wouldn’t hurt them but when times are relatively easy for them the bears figure “why take that chance?” But if they are put under enough natural pressure where their survival now depends on getting just a few more calories of fat into them before winter sets in, more and more of them will think its a risk worth taking.

Did you know that your average suburban housing development has more calories per acre than a typical plot of New Jersey forestland? It’s true. This is why our Deer population is so unmanageably large in suburban areas, because the things we buy at Home Depot to make the front porch look better are the very things that deer like to eat. (Remind me to tell you the story of my post-partem wife and her reaction to the deer eating all her “just about to bloom” lilies; I’ve never been so scared in my life.) Bears are omnivores, and they will not leave those calories just lying around while they starve to death out in “nature”.

As far as they are concerned, human territory is a part of “nature” too. And a bear that has just been pushed out of its old territory by a bigger tougher bruin isn’t going to worry about whether it’s crossing some imaginary line between nature and civilization. When it sees that unprotected 15 month old in the backyard playpen, all it’s going to see is several thousand low risk calories that will be easy to catch. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country so that circumstance is absolutely going to occur. But as a mental exercise, just imagine the effect releasing 200 bears into New York’s central park would have on the local environment. Do you imagine those bears would be running from people at first glance and toughing out an existence in the sewer systems, or would it be more likely that school kids would be finding pieces of what used to be homeless people here and there?

The other issue that seems to be wildly misunderstood is the role that hunters would play in this natural eco-system. Hunters do not want to kill all the bears, quite the contrary. To all but the most simple minded this is obvious, but given the comments on NJ.com, I think it bears repeating. What hunters want to do is keep the bear population at a level where there are still plenty of bears, but not so many that they are being trapped a mile from the state house in downtown Trenton. (Like they are now.) Hunters want a bear population with the sustainable population levels set by biologists for the DEP who study the bears at length, and they want the policy to be set based on science, not politics.

No animal in America that is being legally hunted has ever been wiped out. In fact, because of the careful science employed in determining hunting season lengths and locations, animal populations invariably increase after hunting is allowed. Hunting and conservation groups have brought Wild Turkeys back from virtual extinction in North America. And as their populations swelled, so did the population of the coyotes that prey on them. This is as it should be. Dozens of other efforts are currently underway (all to them funded by money from hunters) to reintroduce, elk, buffalo, and other species whose populations were depleted when hunting was about food rather than sport. In short, no group invests more and is more active in conservation efforts than hunters, despite what anti-hunter bigots would have you believe. Hunting is all about conservation. And while hunters may seem less concerned about individual bears than some other groups claim to be, they are much more concerned about the health of the bear population as a whole than any of the groups who advocate for so called “animal rights”. That’s what true conservation is really about. And the self-congratulatory “environmental groups” who claim to care for animals, really don’t.

The fact they would be reluctant to share with you is, bears don’t ever die of old age in comfortable beds surrounded by their families and cared for with government funded health care. In nature, there are only three ways that wild animals die, starvation, disease, and natural predation. (And it’s usually some combination of all three.) The animal rights groups think it’s somehow more moral to allow the animal population to swell to unsustainable levels, causing more of them to be eaten by other animals when they are too sick and weak from hunger to run away, than it is for humans to manage the population and ensure the better survival of those that remain. Oh and I misspoke; since bears are omnivores there usually is family around them when they die in the wild, but it’s because the surviving family members usually eat them.

Organized hunting doesn’t wipe an animal out; it helps the population as a whole to survive. And it ensures that the confrontations between bears and people are kept at a minimum. And that’s because a legal hunting season has another effect on a bear population. Every bear is slightly different in how it sees people. Some bears are more people averse, while others are less so. It’s the less human averse bears that would typically be killed during a hunting season, which would cause those with the stronger aversion to humans to pass that tendency on to future generations. This reduces the likelihood that the bears that remain will become “problem bears”. In effect, it’s good for the bears, and if I can be so bold as to speak for all hunters, that would be just fine with us as well.

If we let the animal rights crowd continue to set the state policy for managing bears, then bears will eventually kill at least one child in New Jersey. This isn’t speculation, its math; and is as inevitable as the sunrise. It may take a year, or it may take ten, but it’s going to happen that way. And when it happens, you people in Trenton who have been so willfully irresponsible about the whole thing will be held accountable. You had the option of acting on the science of the issue, and instead you chose to curry the political favor of the vocal but tiny animal rights minority. If it remains unchanged, then that decision will eventually cost a life, and when that happens, we’re going to make sure it costs you your political career, and your place in history as well.