credit:  Ian McAllister/pacificwild.org

Bears are now being celebrated at the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver. There are pictures of grizzlies and black bears on posters and murals all over town, even a huge white Spirit bear was featured in the opening ceremony.  Bears are imbedded in Canadian culture and society; they symbolize our natural world that we are so blessed with, yet come this spring British Columbia is set to make another dubious milestone in its checkered history of bear management.

In April of 2010, the BC government plans on opening the sport hunt of bears in the Great Bear Rainforest. The genetically distinct Haida black bear will be targeted as well as the monarch of the rainforest - the grizzly.  Even the coastal black bear that carries the recessive gene that produces the pure white bear or Spirit bear can legally be killed.  The iconic bear is featured as the NRDC logo.

Bears will just be waking up from their long winter hibernation, and moving to lower elevation sedge meadows in search of the protein rich plants. Tragically, "sport" hunters will be waiting, hiding in blinds with high-powered rifles waiting to take home a lifeless trophy.

In 2007, 430 grizzlies were killed in B.C., 363 of them by sport hunters, making the year the highest rate of hunter-caused mortality of this iconic bear since records have been kept. This sad statistic puts the lie to the provincial government’s own description of grizzlies as perhaps the greatest symbol of the wilderness whose survival will be the greatest testimony to our environmental commitment.

British Columbia supports one of the greatest diversity of bears in the world. However, our government continues to treat bears as an expendable resource. The science behind the population estimates on which annual harvest rates are based is flawed and arguments in support of bear hunting are based on false assumptions about the economic importance of the hunt. And clearly, a growing number of people believe it is time to end the trophy hunt before these animals are pushed to the brink of extinction or extirpated as they have been elsewhere in the continent.

Why do we allow the bear hunt to continue?  This is a question I have been asking the government of BC for a long time and have yet to be provided with an answer that addresses three basic issues: Economics, Conservation and Culture. 

Starting with culture: For me, hunting for subsistence makes sense.  I would find it difficult to live where I do if I did not hunt and fish to provide for my family, but the trophy hunt is about something entirely different, it is about gratuitous greed and pleasure.  It is simply to put a trophy on the wall.

Today, it should be culturally unacceptable and a practice we look back on with shame.  First Nations on this coast find killing animals for pleasure or sport culturally abhorrent, as we all should.

Conservation:  We don't know enough about the status of bears in the rainforest to justify a sport kill and given the uncertainty facing bears especially with declining salmon runs and climate change we should be doing everything possible to protect them.

Economics are simple:  A live bear is worth far more than a dead one.  For example one bear viewing lodge in Glendale Inlet at Knight Inlet on the south end of the Great Bear Rainforest generates more revenue for the Province of B.C. than the entire trophy hunt of bears combined.

Bears are sentient, intelligent animals and they deserve a quality of life. I don't presume to know exactly what that means to a bear, but it surely does not mean being killed indiscriminately just for someone to mount on a wall.  I do not believe that we can evolve as a caring society when we allow animals to be killed for perverse pleasure, greed or ignorance.  Trophy hunting is an anachronism and when it is banned it simply won't be missed.

British Columbia should be positioning itself as a forward thinking society, one that is caring and respectful of animals that we share this beautiful Province with.  In the end, if we cannot protect our most iconic land mammals from deliberate sport killing what does that tell us about ourselves?

See Pacific Wild's trophy hunt ad at Liz Barratt-Brown's Switchboard blog.