This commentary is by Brenna Galdenzi of Stowe, president of Protect Our Wildlife.
I’ve always been one to give credit where credit is due, and despite our many differences in opinion, I want to commend Jaclyn Comeau’s work in helping Vermonters manage conflicts with bears.
I’ve exchanged helpful emails with her in the past concerning some of the challenges that bears face, including humans behaving badly. Example: People leaving bird feeders out all year long.
But that does not indemnify her and the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department from endorsing an inherently cruel and abusive practice: bear hounding. I found her examples of the benefits of bear hounding to be purposely narrow and reflective of a very small percentage of why people run hounds on bears.
Bears have little peace in Vermont. Starting on June 1, when mother bears are still nursing small cubs and are not in good physical shape, they are forced to abandon their cubs and flee from packs of frenzied hounds during the hound “training” season.
Even our neighboring state of New Hampshire does not allow the season to start so early, due to the fact that bears have not had the time to put on weight after their long denning period (often referred to as “hibernation”).
The hound training season lasts all summer long, right through the start of the extremely long bear hunting season — that includes the use of hounds — that starts on Sept. 1 and runs through the approximately the last week of November. In short, bears are terrorized by hounds for six months, leaving them only the month of May to live on our landscapes free from harassment (not including the time when they’re denning, December toApril.)
According to the most recent records on Vermont’s bear hunt, over 20% of the bear population was hunted and killed — an alarming percentage, considering that bears breed only every two years and don’t reach sexual maturity until 3 to 4 years old. Half of the bears killed were female, which means that many bears were left without their mothers. Cubs stay with their mothers for approximately 16 months.
Much of the hounding activity results in chasing bears from the woods, where we want them, and into roads and residential areas. This has resulted in heated confrontations with private property owners and also potential vehicle collisions.
Some of these chases last for hours over miles. In a study where five bears were chased, the mean length of the chase was 1.9 hours and the average distance traveled by the bears was 6.9 miles. A Vermont hunter posted on Facebook that her hounds chased a bear for six hours until the bear ran onto a major road.
Considering all of this, how could a bear biologist possibly suggest that hounding is good for bears?
While some bears will flee up a tree, other bears are known to stand their ground and fight back. We’ve read instances where Vermont hounders have documented that their hounds were injured in the fights. This is only made worse by the fact that the hounders are often miles away in their vehicles and have zero control of their hounds.
How many bears and cubs are injured each year that go undocumented? We suspect many. How many deer fawn, moose calves and other non-target wildlife are injured by these uncontrolled hounds? If my dogs were caught running deer, they could be shot by a Fish & Wildlife game warden. Hounders get a free pass.
Comeau talks about misinformation and emotion. Yes, there’s plenty of that, including the assertion that hounding is somehow good for bears. One does not need to be a bear biologist to understand that bear hounding is an exceptionally cruel and disruptive method of hunting bears.
Does Comeau need a scientific paper to inform her that a sentient being is being terrorized by a pack of baying and biting hounds at their heels? There’s a reason most states prohibit this activity.
As we recently discussed in one of our podcasts — titled, “Is Fish & Wildlife using science to inform wildlife policy decisions?” — it would be very helpful if Fish & Wildlife were to state its biases, including the requirement to support current wildlife management policies, including bear hounding.
Shrouding the support of these outdated and cruel practices under the cloak of science, while not disclosing the politics behind it, is not helpful. Learn more about the challenges that bears face in Vermont here.
