Anti-hunters in Florida have devised an underhanded scheme to try to scuttle the scheduled black bear hunt set to begin on December 6.
In August, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) voted unanimously to approve rules establishing a black bear hunt in the for 2025 and beyond. Florida has not held a bear hunt since 2015.
Wildlife officials say the hunt is needed to manage Florida’s expanding black bear population, which has boomed from only a few hundred back in the 1970s to more than 4,000 today. In fact, some estimates put the current population at more than 7,000 bears.
Now, anti-hunters, who don’t want to see the bears hunted, are trying to minimize the hunt by applying for tags, and if drawn not using the tags. That will leave real bear hunters with far less opportunity to participate in the hunt.
Organizations including Bear Defenders, Speak Up Wekiva and the Sierra Club are actively encouraging their supporters to buy up as many of the $5 lottery tag entries as they can. With only 172 tags available, if anti-hunters won even 86 tags, they would effectively cut the opportunities for legitimate hunters in half.
Chuck O’Neil, attorney for Speak Up Wekiva, told news-press.com that he expects about half of the 172 permits issued by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to go to non-hunters who have purchased the tags just to keep hunters for having the opportunity.
“We’re going to win some tags, that’s for sure,” O’Neil said told the news site. “We’re shooting for half of the tags, I don’t know what the final number will come out as, but we’re definitely in this lottery in a big way.”
Hunters can apply for as many tags as they wish, at $5 per application entry. The more times you apply, the higher your chance of winning a tag.
While bear biologists at the state game agency said that if only half the prescribed number of bears are taken this year, they’ll simply raise the quote for next year by that amount. However, O’Neil has a plan for that too.
“And we’ll quadruple our numbers next time,” O’Neil said. “We’re ready for next year and we’re not going to stop getting people on board to join on efforts.”
To prove that the anti-hunting groups’ chicanery is based on emotion instead of science, hunt opponents continue inform wildlife managers of how “unpopular” the hunt is.
Environmental groups like the Conservancy of Southwest Florida have reached out to FWC recently, hoping for a last-minute change from commissioners.
“A bear hunt is unpopular in Southwest Florida,” Amber Crooks, senior environmental policy manager for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, said in an email to the agency. “Historic polling indicated that 49% of people oppose the hunt in the South Big Cypress Unit 37. Newer informal polling, conducted by the Naples Daily News, showed that 92% of over 3,000 respondents voted against the bear hunt.”
Of course, wildlife is better managed by experts than emotion. But you can’t tell anti-hunters that.
While the damaging move to take away as many tags as possible isn’t illegal, it does have a silver lining. All of the $5 entries submitted by anti-hunters, as the funds will go into FWC coffers for legitimate wildlife management purposes, including hunting.
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