Charlie Russell, the iconic grizzly bear behavioural expert who has worked around the world with threatened grizzly populations, is calling for an end to the grizzly hunt in the Kootenays and throughout BC.
Along with two other veterans from different walks of life – Julius Strauss, a former long-serving war correspondent, and Fred Easton, a founding member of Greenpeace, he said that it was time to differentiate between hunting for food and trophy hunting.
“I would be a hypocrite if I said absolutely I was against hunting but I am very much against hunting for sport and this is far too wonderful an animal to just kill for the fun of it.” Russell added that the time for trophy hunting has passed and that government officials and biologists should change their way of managing the species. “I spent the better part of my life treating bears as friends and it works. If Parks people and bear managers could start talking about them in a different way, we would get rid of the fear.”
Russell said that the demonization of grizzly bears by hunters feeds into a cycle of fear and violence that prevents better coexistence with humans. Russell, who famously worked with orphaned cubs in Kamchatka in Russia’s Far East, was joined by Strauss and Easton in calling for an end to the hunt.
The three announced they have formed a pressure group, www.stopthegrizzlyhunt.org, to try and persuade the BC provincial government to drop the grizzly hunt.
Strauss, who worked in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Sierra Leone before emigrating to Canada several years ago to set up a small eco-tourism operation, said, “It’s time that the BC government woke up and smelled the coffee.
“The rest of the world already thinks we are Neanderthals for allowing the legal hunt of an iconic and threatened species and the polls show that the vast majority of BC residents agree with them.
“Our reputation is being sullied for the sake of a tiny minority that appears to have the ear of government.” Easton, who as a young man famously took the footage of Russian whalers in the Pacific as part of the international Save the Whale campaign, said, “All three of us have come together from different walks of life because BC needs to redefine its moral compass.
“We can’t strut around pretending we are the Best Place on Earth and Beautiful BC and then cynically allow the slaughter of some of the very animals that make us so special.”
The latest call for an end to the grizzly hunt comes amid growing pressure on the BC government from conservationists and ordinary residents ahead of the Winter Olympics.
In a poll last year, 78 percent of BC residents said that they considered the hunt unethical. On the BC coast recent reports from eco-tourism operators have suggested that the number of bears is down dramatically after two years of poor salmon runs.
A recent survey in Alberta found there were only 581 grizzly bears left outside the national parks.
The BC Ministry of Environment, which obtains substantial program funding from hunting organizations, maintains that the population is healthy.
But a recent study of grizzly numbers in the Selkirk and Purcell mountains suggested the government has significantly over-estimated the number of grizzly bears.
After pressure from local residents, the Kootenay branch of the Ministry of Environment recently put on hold a plan to extend the grizzly hunt by 10 days each year. Around 55 grizzly bears are legally killed each year in the Kootenays and taken as a trophy. The number for the whole of BC is around 300.
Trophy hunters who shoot grizzlies leave the carcass to rot in the bush
The Ministry of Environment requires that hunters take the skull and part of the penis or a testicle for a male and part of the teat or mammary gland for a female to prove the animal’s sex. About one third of the bears shot are females.
Eco-tourism operators offering bear-viewing holidays to tourists bring in many times the income as non-resident hunters who come to BC to kill grizzly bears as trophies.
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In neighboring Montana, killing a grizzly bear is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. On Nov 10, State and federal officials increased the reward to $11,000 in a grizzly bear poaching case. The bear, dubbed Maximus, had been dead for about a month when found on Aug 12th. It was 7 1/2 feet tall and weighed about 765 pounds when it was accidentally captured in 2007 as part of a population study. Officials estimated it weighed about 800 pounds when it died.
