The encroachment of wild animals into urban and suburban environments demonstrates need for management.
By Randy Spencer
Special to the Sun Journal

The pages of The Wall Street Journal are probably not a place you’d think to look for articles on bear hunting. But these days, such articles, like bears themselves, are turning up in the most unlikely places.

“Return of the Wild,” appearing in a recent edition with Geoffrey Norman’s byline, opens with enough shock value to make most of the newspaper’s 1.4 million readers read on.

“Suburbanites must learn to kill again.”

He’s talking about the bear problem in New Jersey. Make that bear crisis.

Earlier this month, an “emergency” bear season was opened in that state after nearly four decades of moratorium. The state was not brought to that point gracefully. It was dragged there kicking and screaming with protests of every stripe, including even a hunger strike. The screaming came from 1,175 complaints, actual bear attacks on suburbanites, and the news that a five-month-old baby was killed by a black bear just over a year ago 70 miles from New York City.

“That New Jersey has any bears at all probably comes as a surprise to many people who don’t live there and think of the place as one large suburb where the most dangerous animal around is Tony Soprano,” Norman writes.

The state does, indeed, have a large portion of its population living in suburban areas, though there are still sizable tracts of rural land. The trouble is, the ever-burgeoning bear population does not prefer the latter. Suburbia is utopia for the black bear, driven there by overcrowding resulting from the lack of management. Bird feeders, dog dishes, barbecues and garbage cans make the neighborhoods a veritable black bear Oz, and provide sufficient reason to cut their long hibernation short.

Norman summarized the other wild-animals-turned-peripheral-pests that have New Jersey’s anti-hunters up in arms against those who want to be up and armed to meet the growing problem.

Deer, a separate crisis all its own, are called “rats with hooves” there. They are spreading Lyme disease in the state at an alarming rate. Vehicles involved in crashes with whitetails are on the rise, the average cost of which is $2,000 per accident. Deaths, of course, do occur as a result of some of these crashes.

Another article from the Star-Ledger in New Jersey gives accounts of children seeing three to five bears per day on their way to and from school. Police officers traveling a beat see more than a dozen per day. Children are now taught to carry their lunch sandwiches in their hands rather than in a lunch box so they can drop it and run if attacked.

In New Jersey, as in other states, a prevailing anti-hunting temperament has led to rampant loss of property, assorted damages, even to a quality of life issue. In many communities, the difficult news that these once adored and idealized wild animals have spun off into a kind of bear chaos rampaging through screen doors, porches, garages and even kitchens has caused a kind of moral shift. At this extreme point in the downward conservation spiral, residents there are considering the recruitment of professional game killers in a last-ditch attempt to reestablish a balance.

Moose in Maine, cougars in Colorado, gators in Florida, and coyotes just about everywhere are, says Geoffrey Norman, “increasingly making a case against themselves. There is no way to negotiate with them, and they cannot be regulated. There may be technological fixes out there in the future, but for now the solution to the problem of too many animals seems simply to be – killing them.”

This moral shift toward reinstating the bear hunt in New Jersey is sending chills up the spines of animal activists. Soccer moms and other gentle suburbanites have traded in their Disney-esk view of the animal world for a mercenary sharpshooter who will exact revenge for the beloved house cat dragged away or the lavender leaves eaten out of the herb garden. That’s not to mention the safety of the children.

Maine, which has an enviable Wildlife Division managing the largest black bear population east of the Mississippi, will be given the opportunity to head off problems states like New Jersey are now facing.

Next year, Maine will be given the chance to vote for bear conservation rather than bear chaos, bear management rather than bear mayhem.

The bear harvest in Maine, 80 percent of which derives from the early bear seasons, maintains a bear population of about 23,000 annually. Removing the early seasons removes the sharpest management tool in the shed. Mainers, living closer to the real animal world, not the idealized one of National Geographic and the Disney Channel, may come to the more mature conclusion that allowing game populations to breed out of control is neither prudent nor humane.

Randy Spencer is a registered Master Maine Guide. He lives in Grand Lake Stream.

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