Stephen Hume: B.C.’s promotion of grizzly hunt is ideological, not scientific
Killing of a threatened species to satisfy a marginal industry makes no sense
By Stephen Hume, Vancouver SunNovember 7, 2013
A new scientific study reports that grizzly bear mortalities exceed government targets in half the areas where hunting is permitted. This earns another “ho hum” from provincial wildlife authorities.
So what’s new? When the province’s own habitat specialist first raised concerns with methodology in estimating grizzly populations and mortality rates, his bosses suppressed the study.
The province estimates 15,000 grizzlies inhabit British Columbia. Mind you, grizzly estimates seem to be whatever it takes to justify trophy hunting. In 1979, there were 6,600 grizzlies. Then, when trophy hunting was on the agenda, there were almost 17,000.
The debate over grizzlies is not a discussion of scientific evidence that contradicts hunting policy, it’s an emotional argument over lifestyle choices by trophy hunting proponents who are not really interested in science.
Presumably this why the government is comfortable saying wildlife managers don’t share the new study’s conclusions before they’ve even analyzed its evidence — although, of course, they promise to review it.
The study by six biologists from Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation reported by Larry Pynn is only the latest that will wind up gathering dust on the shelf where the provincial government puts documents it wants to forget. It has been preceded by reports from some of the world’s leading grizzly experts.
These studies gather dust not because the evidence is unconvincing but because provincial politicians are not interested in evidence-based decisions. They want justification for providing feedstock for a hunting industry that’s in steep decline.
Thirty years ago, there were almost 175,000 licensed hunters in B.C. Today, hunters’ numbers have fallen by more than half.
Clearly social values are changing.
Once, people would kill everything they could. Archival photographs record orgies of killing that most of us today — even the most ardent hunters — would find repugnant and slightly mystifying.
But values do change. Today serious anglers embrace the catch-and-release ethos, hunters accept limited-entry lotteries and poachers are reviled.
Those original values have changed, in part, because of increasing scarcity. On Vancouver Island, for example, the black-tailed deer population is less than 20 per cent of what it once was — not because of overhunting but because of habitat loss and alteration. Steelhead runs are in trouble. So are native cutthroat trout. Moose are scarce in some regions.
So as hunting effort must increase with growing scarcity, and opportunity for success decreases, fewer hunters opt to buy licenses.
Finally, a growing sense that animals have rights, too, informs changing attitudes toward the killing of wildlife, particularly among young citizens. The idea of killing large animals like grizzly bears for pleasure or personal vanity rather than for food is perceived as abusive.
The response of provincial fish and game management has not been to adapt to change, but to promote hunting in the face of falling numbers. Its service plan calls for the selling of an additional 20,000 hunting licences by 2014.
The grizzly bear trophy hunt, which the province doggedly supports in the face of overwhelming public approbation, represents ideology, not wildlife science or public will.
Industrial strategy is presented as an exercise in sustainable management based on science, even though the managers acknowledge they have already reached their own conclusions before they examine unwelcome scientific evidence to the contrary.
But let’s be clear, the opposition to trophy hunting of grizzly bears is not an issue with hunting, it’s an issue with purpose.
Most British Columbians don’t oppose sustainable harvesting of wildlife for food. Most support, for example, the goals of the B.C. Wildlife Federation, which advocates for habitat that will sustain healthy populations available for harvesting by hunters and anglers.
The opposition is to the killing, for purposes of personal vanity, of a threatened species that has already been extirpated from most of its North American range in the interests of a marginal industry dominated by a few businesses.
Write about this and one immediately is subjected to scurrilous comments from trophy hunters who don’t want “their” bears taken away. But B.C.’s wildlife doesn’t belong exclusively to hunters or outfitters. Fish and game belong to everyone, including the almost 90 per cent of British Columbians who want grizzly bears protected, not slaughtered in the service of narcissists and egomaniacs.
We live in a democracy. In democracies, majorities rule — or should rule. So if you care about grizzly bears, you know what to do. Start telling your elected representatives that if they won’t act on your behalf on this file, you’ll elect somebody who will.
Photo of bears in the wild co Jim Robertson
Exposing the Big Game 