Why hunting is big business in Canada
Saturday, 17 June 2006
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Bear hunting is big business all across Canada, where many adventure companies charge clients $3,000 or more for the privilege of spending a week deep in the forest and having the chance to score a black bear.
The spring season, which is now ending, is controversial with some because it takes advantage of the bears as they are emerging from their long winter hibernation and urgently foraging for food. Spring hunts are banned in all but six US states, but most of Canada's provinces offer a spring season.The exception is Ontario where bears are protected until summer's end.
Licences are issued each year in the name not just of sport but also population control. In spite of a relatively low reproduction rate (females do not usually produce their first cubs until they reach five years old) the bear population has been climbing. The population of black bears, or Ursus americanus, in Canada is thought to have reached about 450,000.
The hunting lobby draws more support each year as sometimes deadly encounters between humans and bears increase. There were three deaths last year in Ontario alone, the last in September when a woman, Jacqueline Perry, was killed in a provincial park and her husband was injured.
Even unskilled hunters, whether their weapons are rifles or bows and arrows, can expect to return home from a hunting holiday with at least one bear on their score-card. That's because the companies make their job relatively easy. Typically, guides will set up feeding stations with rotting meat and then install the hunters in nearby blinds to shoot the bears as they arrive.
Alternatively, bait is set is at several sites in an area of forests and dogs, fitted with one-way transmitters on their collars, are released to track the bears.
No hunter, however, is allowed to shoot more than two bears in a single hunting week and hunters are encouraged to avoid shooting females. In practice, animal welfare advocates claim that about 30 per cent of the roughly 20,000 bears killed annually in Canada are females.
Wildlife officials concede that the bears are often victims not only of licensed hunters but also of poachers, many of whom are feeding an important and illegal trade in fur and other bear parts. The poaching is fed by a demand for paws and gall bladders which are sold to south-east Asia where they are thought to have powerful medicinal qualities.
