A B.C. Supreme Court Justice has upheld a lower court decision that found a Gitanyow man guilty of illegally shooting a grizzly bear sow and one of her cubs that had ventured near his home.
Robbie Shirey did not dispute that he shot the bears with the help of a lamp during the evening hours and when it was out of season to do so. But he maintained he was within his rights because the animals had constituted a menace to his dogs when he shot the two on Nov. 1, 2012.
Home to between 400 and 600 people, Gitanyow is located at the confluence of two rivers about 135 kilometres northwest of Smithers. According to a reasons for judgment from Justice Hope Hyslop, there is a healthy-sized population of grizzly bears and in October 2012 there was a particularly large run of pink salmon leading to dead and rotting fish on the river banks.
On one side of the community, the river is about 10 metres from the road while Shirey's home is about 200 metres away.
Responding to complaints from the community about the sow and her two cubs, conservation officers based in Smithers attended the area with the aim of removing attractants in the hope the bears would leave.
The conservation officers never did see the bears in question but found garbage, an old freezer full of fish the bears had overturned and were eating, and a moose carcass hanging under a tarpaulin on an abandoned swing set on Shirey's property.
Shirey first saw the sow and cubs sometime during Oct. 25-26 after returning from a hunting trip and was aware complaints had been made about them earlier.
Shirey testified that on the day of the shooting, he had seen the three traveling back and forth to the freezer of rotting fish and coming within about 40 metres of his home. Between Shirey's home and the freezer there lived about two dozen children, according to Hyslop.
At about 7 or 8 p.m. Shirey was working on a car using a trouble light for visibility when he saw the smaller of the cubs eating at the carcass. He got a gun and shot it dead with one shot.
Knowing the sow would come back looking for her cub and would be very angry, Shirey and a friend got up on top of a smokehouse on his property and, with the help of a lamp, he shot and killed her when she came within range. Conservation officers killed the second cub the next day.
Shirey had said the bears were coming closer and closer and one of the cubs had chased his dogs up a hill towards the back of his home.
However, Hyslop noted Shirey had failed to live up to a promise made to a conservation officer a few days earlier to remove the carcass. She also noted that the dog chasing episode occurred on a different occasion and Shirey did not shoot the cub at that time. Because he did not shoot, Hyslop, concluded the cub was not a menace at the time.
Finally, when the cub and the sow were shot, Hyslop found that while they were on his property, neither was being a menace to his dogs. The sow was shot only as a result of the earlier shooting of the cub, Hyslop added in dismissing Shirey's appeal.
