Bad News Bear Hunters

If animal rights outfits were to design a scheme for depicting hunters as stupid, lazy, and cruel, they couldn't come up with anything more effective than bearbaiting, which is legal and passionately defended by game managers and radical right-to-hunt groups in Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and most of Canada.

Here's how it works: Your guide or outfitter festoons the woods with garbage, then plants you (often in a folding chair) a few yards from a bait site that's being “hit.” When the bear shows up, you “harvest” it. “Our primary bait is bread, doughnuts, buns, and pastries, to which we add liquid sugar or corn syrup,” explains Wisconsin bear guide Gilbert Arndt, who goes through about thirty 55-gallon drums of bait a season. Alberta guide Kevin Wilson prefers sacks of cream-filled cookies, decaying beaver carcasses, rotting fish guts, and “grease poured around the base of the bait barrel, particularly the kind discarded by restaurants that use deep fryers.” Prepackaged commercial bear bait such as “Wildlife Buffet's” and “Smelly Beaver” and “Jelly Bean” is also available. “Stop digging in the dumpsters for your bear bait,” shouts one ad. “Wildlife Buffet's Bear Bait will bring the bear and hold them there. . . . Don't leave home without it!”

Once hooked on garbage, bears learn to seek it around human dwellings and campsites. If they don't get shot at the bait site, they may get shot on either side of a door. As the U.S. Forest Service accurately puts it in its brochures: “A fed bear is a dead bear” and “Once [bears] become accustomed to dining on human garbage they realize humans are great sources of ‘food.' This leads to human–bear conflicts, and bears always lose.” If you want to watch or photograph bears on land managed by the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management, you might get busted if you put out food for them. In states where baiting is legal, you can feed bears only if you're trying to kill them.

In Alaska humans face increased danger from grizzlies conditioned to bait set out for black bears. In the spring of 2005 Alaskans were even allowed to target grizzles with bait as part of a predator-control program that includes the aerial shooting of wolves and is aimed at increasing moose-hunting opportunities. As the state's Department of Fish and Game explains, “Some people have an interest in helping with wildlife management and want to do their share.”

With bearbaiting there's scarcely any middle ground between two positions: “Hell yes!” and “Hell no!” Having been briefed by his Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Maine Governor John Baldacci proclaimed that without baiting, his state would be unable to “control the growth of the bear population so the population pressure doesn't force bears into areas with high human populations.” But shortly before leaving office, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura had this to say: “Going out there and putting jelly doughnuts down, and Yogi comes up and sits there and thinks he's found the mother lode for five days in a row—and then you back-shoot him from a tree? . . . That ain't sport—that's an assassination.”

Bearbaiting isn't a biological issue; as a result of short hunting seasons and strict bag limits, black bears have made a dramatic comeback in the past few decades and are doing well throughout their range. So why should Audubon devote precious space to the topic? First, the hunter's image is very much our business because, as we've consistently reported, hunting is the only means by which native ecosystems can be saved from irruptions of wild ungulates. Second, there's much more at stake here than just the hunter's image. Bearbaiting diminishes the public's respect for wild things and wild places. It's a cheap shortcut not far removed from canned hunts (shooting animals inside enclosures). A fair-chase hunter is invested in natural habitat and will defend it when it's threatened. A bait hunter may not be invested in much of anything other than a job he has to get back to fast—before he has time to learn what bears are or how bears live or even to go bear hunting.

I am an ardent hunter (though not of big game), and for 14 years I was a part-time employee of the ardently pro-hunting Gray's Sporting Journal—a literate, lavishly illustrated celebration of fair chase. In June 1981, when bearbaiting was just catching on in Maine, Gray's dispatched me to Jackman, a tiny settlement tucked into purple mountains along the Maine–Quebec border, to cover the spring bear hunt. Bearbaiting was no different then, except that, at least in Maine, it's now permitted only in fall (so nursing cubs aren't orphaned) and it has become big business. These days the state licenses about 6,000 nonresident bear hunters a year for $156 each. Corporate landholders sell about 10,000 bait sites to guides for as much as $100 per site, per season; as part of the deal they run the outfitters' competition, including private bear hunters, out of the woods. Finally, guides charge something like $1,500 per hunt. The clients haven't changed, though. They're still largely from out of state, often from large cities. Usually they have only a few days to hunt. They don't have time to track bears, to find and identify their natural foods, to learn about or even see bear habitat.

I was armed only with a Nikon, but my fellow sportsmen toted high-powered rifles, bowie knives, and immense, gleaming handguns. Some had Pancho Villa–style bandoliers draped across their chests. Before we were driven to the baits, Jack, our outfitter, sat us down for a safety lecture. He held up an enormous pair of skivvies, placing his index finger through a hole at the center of a stiff, black circle the size of a frying pan. The previous owner had drilled the hole when he'd been practicing his quick draw. “I think I shot myself in the ass,” he'd intoned as he stood in the gravel road, wide-eyed and swaying. He had.

I shared a bait station with George, 18, of Paeonian Springs, Virginia. Together we watched garbage for five hours and 16 minutes, during which time we heard one red squirrel (which George identified as a circling bear) and saw and/or fed at least 750,000 blackflies. The animal rights folks ask if baiting is fair to bears. A better question might be: Is it fair to guys like George? George had saved his money and answered an ad for “bear hunting in Maine.” But he hadn't hunted, and what he'd seen of Maine was mostly a black spruce supporting an onion bag full of rotten meat.

Put such questions to managers from bearbaiting states and, invariably, they'll offer an irrelevant truth followed by a superstition. The irrelevant truth is that black bears are stable or increasing throughout their range; the superstition—dispelled by the 17 bear-hunting states that have outlawed baiting—is that baiting is an “indispensable tool” for keeping bear populations in check, especially where the woods are “too thick” for efficient bear hunting. Never is there a suggestion that the hunting might be more efficient if hunters acquired better skills.