Grizzly bears.

[JLives]

I killed a whitetailed doe for my freezer this year - it is a trophy to me, because it is feeding my family, and the experience of taking responsibility for the food we eat and sharing that experience with my wife who also shot a nice deer on that trip was tremendous.

There's no such thing as "trophy hunting." That is simply a moniker devised by anti-hunting groups that try to smear the image of the people who actually do all the conservation work and fund all the COs and wildlife biologists in this province.

Stop heaping shame on people whose lifestyles differ from yours.

If you are hunting for only head or hide that is trophy hunting. I fully support hunting including grizzlies. I've been hunting with family and friends since I was 5. Please don't be disingenuous. I have seen many carcasses left in the bush over the years. It's gross and wrong but it does happen far too often. If you take an animal you need to use as many resources from it as possible. It's not about lifestyle differences. Trophy hunting is flat out wrong.

[Fancy]

Trophy hunting has been a term used for decades (1950's from one article I was reading) so I'm not sure why the term is an issue.

[Rwede]

I know. Which is nature. What was GF's point though?

His point is that the grizzly population is going to decline because they aren't hunted. The mature boars, which are the ones targeted by grizzly hunters, kill the cubs they encounter to trigger the sow to come into heat again so they can breed her.

Wildlife populations only grow when there is juvenile recruitment. Fawns, calves, cubs are what populations depend on to grow, and at the very least remain stable.

An adult on its own does not grow a population, and ultimately is part of a declining population as natural and other causes of death eventually remove that adult from the population. If there is no recruitment of juveniles to fill that void left when the adult dies, then the population declines.

When we don't manage the number of mature boars through hunting, they end up killing off cubs, exactly as happened in that news story about the death of every cub in Banff. Those boars aren't hunted in Banff, and they're killing all the cubs. That imperils the sustainability of that population of grizzly bears, and it is declining right now.

Horgan's city slicker supporters don't get this, don't want to hear this, and therefore support his doing the wrong thing.

The wildlife biologists in BC pleaded with Horgan not to do what he did, but he wanted your votes more than he wanted to ensure the viability of grizzly bear populations, so he ignored his biologists and banned the hunt.

You're a bunch of ignorant suckers to believe Horgan. Period.

[Rwede]

*removed*

[JLives]

*removed*

[Fancy]

It's not necessarily the roads in the backcountry that bother grizzly bears. Sometimes, it's the people on them.

That's one of the conclusions of new research from the University of Alberta — and it could have big implications for resource development.

"There's no doubt that roads themselves are probably not that bad for bears," said Clayton Lamb, a University of Alberta biologist and co-author of a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Lamb and his colleagues used DNA marking to study the movements of 74 grizzlies over 8,000 square kilometres of wilderness in southern British Columbia between Oliver and Castlegar. They were trying to assess the relationship between road density and bear populations.

"Roads and the humans that travel on them do increase both the risk of bear mortality and the chance that a bear won't use that habitat any more," Lamb said.

Even the narrowest trail has a broad effect.

"That little road might only be five metres wide, but its area of influence is much, much more than that. Bears will avoid large areas around roads."

The study found numbers highest in areas of high-quality habitat where there were no roads at all.

But keep the public off resource roads and grizzlies rebound. Industry use of such roads is sporadic. Public use is regular.

"Closing roads to the public restored bear density in some small areas where this was done," Lamb said. "We would close those roads to the public and then we would elevate bears back up."

Densities where public access to roads was closed recovered 27 per cent — "closer to as if those roads weren't really there."

https://www.castanet.net/edition/news-s ... htm#215760

[Btfsplck]

Carnivores have never been acceptable food for humans. I'm sure there's some scientific proof of that somewhere, but I'm only stating factual common sense.
.

Wait what? You're saying eating animals like Trout, crab, or lobster, is not acceptable? I did not know this. What about pork? Pigs love to eat meat.
I'd like to see this scientific proof you use for your "factual common sense."

[Fancy]

Don't forget chickens - they eat meat too. Humans are omnivores, just like bears, pigs and chimpanzees.