Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, All Rights Reserved
Looking through the scope of a high powered hunting rifle, an excited boy of nine celebrates his birthday by shooting dead a majestic brown bear.
Reed Sutley shouted “yeah” after firing the fatal shot.
The delighted lad and four pals then giggled at the grisly birthday party as they chatted about the killing.
Reed boasted: “We saw eight bears – one down and seven more to go.”
The boys were taken on the trip by Reed’s dad, Greg, who filmed the killing and posted the footage online.
The video – which has emerged as part of a Mirror investigation – shows Reed and his school friends perched in a lair high above the ground.
Whispering and waiting on the wooden platform in a tree, they watched the bears that were lured to the area with bait provided by Mr Sutley.
An adult then took the gun from a collection of weapons and passed it to Reed.
The boy can hardly contain his glee as he prepared to kill.
Reed took aim as two bears gorged on the food.
His dad gave encouragement and told the lad to shoot the animal that was lying on the floor while it ate.
A single bullet is fired and the animal collapses as Reed celebrates the slaying and the other bear runs away.
After filming the birthday party in Alberta, Canada, hunter Mr Sutley posted the harrowing three-minute video – called “9 Year Old Shoots First Bear at Birthday Party” – on YouTube.
The proud dad bragged on his YouTube page: “Reed took his first bear with a perfect shot!”
His footage has attracted outrage, with one YouTube user saying: “Words cannot describe how disgusting this is.
“Greg mate, you should be ashamed of yourself bringing kids out on a road trip for the soul purpose of killing an innocent animal… Why the f*** are these kids laughing… after they killed it?”
Canadian Mr Sutley runs a hunting company in Alberta which charges up to £5,500 for those wanting to follow in the footsteps of Walter Palmer, the US dentist who killed Cecil the lion and has shot dead black bears with a bow and arrow.
The Mirror’s probe into Canada’s cruel hunters found the use of the term “hunter” in parts of North America is not a true reflection of these sickening expeditions.
Images of people tracking animals for days were shown to be myths.
In fact, companies like Mr Sutley’s lure their quarry to their death using barrels filled with beaver tails, doughnuts and maple syrup.
Hunters sit comfortably in hides or trees waiting to kill their prey. The animals are shot dead from yards away.
As part of our investigation we watched as eager trophy hunters descended on Alberta to kill baited bears.
US beauty queen Brittany York, who describes herself on her social media pages as an “animal lover”, is among those who have recently been to the region to hunt.
Last month the 25-year-old along with her dad Richard, 49, travelled more than 2,000 miles via Dallas to Edmonton.
It was her second hunting trip this year to Alberta after killing a bear three months earlier.
Often boasting about her skills she regularly posts graphic pictures and videos of her hunts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
After practising with her bow, Miss York and her party drove in convoy, taking two 4×4 trucks and towing two off-road vehicles to Halliards Bay where her guide and his team bait the area.
For four days the group sat as bears weighing up to 30st and standing 7ft tall ate in front of them, waiting until they found what they thought would make an acceptable kill.
Last Thursday Ms York, who was crowned Miss North Carolina in 2011, published a photo of her dad on Instagram, holding the paw of one of their kills. “Great job, Daddy!” she wrote.
The beauty queen justifies her hobby by claiming she only hunts to eat. But she has been slammed.
One critic said on Facebook: “You call yourself an animal lover when your own cover picture is you smiling disgustingly with a dead animal? You’re despicable.”
Despite repeated attempts to contact Mr Sutley and Miss York, both were unavailable for comment.
The hunts are licensed and there is no suggestion that anything illegal has been done.
Mr Sutley runs his Smoky River Outfitting business from his home in Debolt, Alberta.
The video of his son was published online last year but it has only just been unearthed.
Our probe has also found that hunters can kill bears for as little as £67.
Exposing the Big Game 
Too many humans are happy they are raising murderers and serial killers….
I’ve cried so much that I have no tears right now…and yet I feel them in my bruised soul….
I am vegan..
cruelty free…
my dogs are rescued..spayed and neutered…
I don’t wear wool, leather, silk or fur…
I loathe hunters, their lies and excuses for their sociopathology…
I don’t support animal circuses, marine shows, rodeos and horse racing…
I won’t watch movies without making certain American Humane supervised…I wish all movie directors were like Darren Aronofsky, “NOAH,” who used no real animals in his film, only CGI…
I let out spiders and ants…it is how I’m wired…
I respect animals more than humans and my love for them is unconditional…in my world it is my “non-negotiable moral baseline”…
I’m in the twilight of my years at 70…recently widowed…a retired high school teacher…I devote my time to online animal advocacy and avoiding human beings…I am grieving because my husband died as did one of my precious dogs a month later, but my animal work helps me do something meaningful as I carry and manage my grief…another reason to love animals…therapy…
I will never live to see the day when those who feel joy at the murder of a beautiful sentient creatures will be in the minority…or eating them…yet petting the one at home..
I feel discouraged…and oh, so sad…
but as long as I breathe, I will not stop attempting to disseminate information…
It is our only hope…education…making the connection…
I know it happens…in the past four years, two of my online friends have become vegan..
The knowledge helps me breathe…
Rest softly, sweet bear…you are loved…your life will always have meaning ♥
“Whispering and waiting on the wooden platform in a tree, they watched the bears that were lured to the area with bait provided by Mr Sutley.”
You know, it really doesn’t take much to do this, and it is nothing to be proud of. Send the kid out into the woods all by himself carrying donuts and see if he can do it. Don’t forget to post it on YouTube, so we all can say, ‘one down, 6,999,999,999 to go!!! I can just hear the howls of outrage now about those radical environmentalists.
That’s if a human pedophile doesn’t get him first, which is much more likely.
I swear to God, I think I have heard every deplorable thing about human behavior, and then something like this comes along. Frankly, I don’t care if this is a kid. I hope the Internet explodes all over him and his father, for whom I can find no names bad enough. This reminds me of the dying teenager who wanted to get onto the that Make-A-Wish list, and his last desire was to kill a bear. What a great last testimony to one’s life on this earth–I’m dying so I want to kill something!
I wonder if the other kids’ parents knew that was the kind of birthday party they were going to. If they did, they were equally to blame. If they did not, I hope the whole family is ostracized in the community.
Anyway I hope this gets out there and gets a response similar to Cecil’s.
I know. Staging a canned hunt for a child’s birthday party is not hunting, but a perverse form of entertainment. Whatever happened to paintball? If we didn’t have such emasculated Federal and State fish and wildlife departments, we wouldn’t have such an anything goes mentality to killing wildlife.
I’m no fan of hunting, but hunting in the traditional sense meant getting out into the wilderness with your father (and his father before him), learning about wilderness in spite of yourself, success not guaranteed, walking and burning a few calories, not sitting on your ass and expending as little effort as possible for a guaranteed kill. I’m sorry, I refuse to be politically correct about this because I’ll always associate hunting mostly with men because of my own father and grandfather, and they didn’t sit around on platforms the useless sacks of today. People like Rebecca Francis are an anomaly and tools of the hunting and gun industry to attract a different demographic (she might break a nail on that tacky manicure, don’t you think?), and thankfully biology will always trump human intellectualizing about it, and but good.
Today, we’ve reduced hunting solely to the killing aspect, which we find ‘fun’.
I hope this little brat someday looks back on this with shame, if he inherits any ability to think for himself.
And also, to add to the above, maybe the most important thing, respect for the animal, which is sorely lacking in today’s world. Nobody respects anything at all today, and it is disgusting.
The story is being carried in a number of papers with opportunities to comment on this bloodthirsty birthday party. I made out a check for Planned Parenthood. Wish the grandparents had visited there.
And of course when he one day turns on his fellow humans, they won’t think of events like this. They’ll just try and blame videogames.
Sadly, this is common in idaho, Wisconsin, and probably every state. Perverts are legally allowed to put out bait and then wait for a bear to show up. In Idaho the legislature lowered the hunting age to 9 in the last year or two, so this could have easily happened here and probably already has. There was a proposal to perhaps limit baiting in the Island Park area of Idaho, since grizzlies are present. Bear baiters would have none of it and jeered in online comments that they would not observe restrictions even if they were enacted. Idaho Fish & Game snapped to it and dropped their timid and lukewarm proposal.
There is no understanding the psychology of perverts like this. They are irreparably defective and operating from a moral wasteland. I will continue to ridicule and expose them at every possible opportunity and advocate for policy changes. These perverts wound the hearts and minds of every empathetic human being on earth. If evil does indeed exist, this is where it lives: in the Sutleys and Palmers and Yorks of the world.
I will continue to ridicule and expose them at every possible opportunity and advocate for policy changes.
Totally agree. Just read the comments – deep down, they are a bunch of fkn sacredly cats and they know it. It’s a pleasure to harass the crap out of them. They can only do their dirty work where people can’t see them, but once they are exposed, they deserve a good hanging out to dry public shaming. 🙂
Ha – no, they are not sacredly. more like profane. What happened there? lol I meant ‘scaredy cats’. Have you guys seen the bear snipers video out of BC? Oh for a good ricochet.
Reblogged this on Sherlockian's Blog.
THe world is getting so cruel!
Sorry, but there is no ‘hunting experience’ when all of the challenge is removed so that a kill is guaranteed. Baiting is a disgrace and lazy. That’s what hunting has degraded to nowadays. It should be noted that this kid’s father promotes his outfitting business and is not impartial.
http://www.canada.com/news/national/video+alberta+birthday+bear+hunt+draws+online+outrage+post+cecil/11363551/story.html
This isn’t hunting. This is target practice so when Jr. grows up, he can shoot up a outdoor country music concert, a movie theater, a WalMart, a farmers market…
…or more bears.