Alberta’s grizzy bear hunt plan raises eyebrows

theglobeandmail.com Alberta’s move to reopen the grizzly hunt should only have been made after public consultationKevin Van Tighem
7–9 minutes
Kevin Van Tighem is an Alberta hunter, biologist and author of 15 books including Bears Without Fear. He retired in 2011 as Superintendent of Banff National Park.
The grizzly bear that didn’t kill me became a problem bear two weeks later. I first met her when I blundered into her two cubs while bushwhacking through aspens in Waterton Lakes National Park. I smelled them first, then saw them – barely four metres away. I had forgotten my bear spray. Heart pounding with sudden fear, I looked around, and there was mom.
She turned, locked eyes with me, and I prepared to die. But instead of attacking, after a long moment she turned her back, granting me the opportunity to back out of the woods into the sunlight, and hurry back to my car. Having spent time around people who treated her with respect, she didn’t fear me – and so she didn’t kill me.
Unfortunately, a few days after our encounter, the mom and her cubs pried a couple of boards loose on an old wooden granary just across the park boundary and got themselves a meal of stored oats. The owner called Fish and Wildlife. A bear response team set culvert traps and caught the bears, radio-collared the mother, and relocated them to a remote mountain valley. They gave her a chance, just as she had given me one. Sadly, her radio collar soon sent out a mortality signal; the bear who spared me was dead.
That granary got a lot of bears into trouble over the years, until its owner finally allowed a conservation group to replace it with a bear-proof metal bin. And just like that, bears ceased to become “problems” there.
It wasn’t the bears that were the problem. It was the granary. Replacing it gave the rancher peace of mind, and protected the bears from temptation. It was a win-win solution except, unfortunately, for the mother grizzly who had spared my life. She and her cubs were among the 30 per cent of translocated bears who fail to survive. I’ve always grieved her loss because she was a peaceful animal who showed that it doesn’t always have to go sideways when the lives of bears and humans intersect.
It still does, sometimes. Some grizzlies occasionally kill domestic livestock, break into feed storage bins or even, rarely, attack or kill people. Fortunately, Alberta Fish and Wildlife employs well-trained staff who are attracted to their jobs by a desire to work near wildlife species that they love. And volunteer groups such as the Waterton Biosphere Region’s Carnivores and Communities Program and local Bear Smart committees spend countless hours helping people co-exist with a potentially dangerous – but usually peaceable – large carnivore. Even as numbers of both humans and grizzlies continue to climb in Alberta, conflicts continue to decline.
This is a success story, but the current Alberta government seems unwilling to acknowledge it.
Instead, in spite of the fact that grizzlies are still classified as a threatened species, Forestry and Parks Minister Todd Loewen has announced a plan to solve grizzly problems by issuing hunting licences to hunters eager for trophy kills. In a masterpiece of Orwellian prose, the decision to open the hunt against the advice of biologists was announced under the headline “Protection of Life and Property from Problem Wildlife.”
Pretending it’s about protecting life and property from “problem” bears is a devious way of dressing up a trophy hunt as a public service. It isn’t. It’s pandering to a very small minority of Albertans who have been lobbying for a hunt ever since grizzly hunting was discontinued in the province in 2006. That minority includes Mr. Loewen who, for many years, sold black bear hunts through his company Red Willow Outfitters and who retains deep connections with the bear guiding and hunting community.
The bear vigilantes Mr. Loewen proposes to delegate under his revised Wildlife Act regulation, unlike Fish and Wildlife Officers, won’t have professional training. They will simply apply through Alberta’s hunting draw process. It’s safe to assume they won’t apply there because of a desire to find peaceful solutions; they will apply because of a desire to shoot a grizzly bear. This is not about protecting life and property. It is a trophy hunt for a privileged few.
Grizzly bears have long been a point of intense public interest. Any decision as consequential as reopening a hunt under any guise should have been made only after transparent, open public consultation. Instead, this wrong-headed decision was made behind closed doors by people who apparently fear public debate as much as they fear bears. Alberta’s grizzlies, and people, deserve better.
Dr. Stephen Herrero tallied up human injuries and deaths from grizzly bears in Alberta. He found an average of less than one such attack per year between 1960 and 1998. Most happened in national parks, where Mr. Loewen’s hunters will never be allowed. Even though the province’s grizzly bear population has increased in recent decades, injuries and deaths (eight people have been killed in Alberta since 2005) caused by the bears have remained about the same.
With more bears and more people out there, a key reason why dangerous attacks have not increased is that today’s backcountry users are mostly well-informed about bear safety and have access to highly-effective defensive tools such as capsaicin pepper-based bear sprays. It’s clear that the key to “protection of life and property” is to prevent attacks in the first place through education, information and modern defence technologies like bear spray.
If the Alberta government truly wants to protect human life and property, they should build on proven success – by hiring more professional bear managers to work pro-actively with land owners, recreationists and other backcountry users. Deputizing untrained amateurs interested only in killing a bear is a recipe for disasters. In the rare instances when killing a bear is the only solution, that’s a wildlife officer’s job. Unlike hunters, they also counsel landowners and hikers on how to avoid the next problem.
Dr. Sarah Elmeligi is a Canmore-based grizzly biologist who is also Alberta’s only rural NDP MLA. She says that the province’s Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan “shows that between 2010 and 2015, 10 grizzly bears were euthanized for management action, but the minister is scaring Albertans into believing that grizzly attacks are commonplace and that the only way to solve the problem is to kill bears. This is just outright false. Killing bears doesn’t reduce conflict, it reduces populations. How can that be acceptable when at the same time we are committed to recovering the population?”
Good question. It’s one that should have been posed to the people of Alberta through a fulsome public consultation, supported by hard data and expert advice, before the government decided whether to let hunters kill a threatened species or to focus on other, better solutions.
Ironically, one outcome of turning armed vigilantes loose on Alberta’s grizzly population may be actually to decrease public safety – not increase it. Analyses by Steve Herrero and others show that most grizzly attacks on humans are defensive ones by mothers defending their young from perceived danger. The bear that didn’t kill me evidently didn’t see me as a threat. Would that have been the case if she’d had to dodge hunters and bullets before we met?
I’m glad I didn’t have to find out. I worry, now, that others will.
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