I am a grizzly bear proponent and hunter. Most of the information challenging the provinces grizzly bear studies and management position is rhetoric as is written in this article; "one hunter I talked to says there are only 80,000 bears in B.C." That's not a fact, it is nonsense delivered without any credible information to back it up. Grizzly bear hunting compared to the cod fishery? I can't even see an infinitesimal correlation; one is a sport hunt that is consistently under-subscribed and has a three per cent success ration while the other is a commercial fishery that was oversubscribed and obviously had a greater than 100 per cent success rate. It's like comparing apples and oranges. Unfortunately there are many people who entertain written information as fact and there in itself is the problem. We pay, via our taxes, provincial biologists to gather information, decipher such and manage populations with a long-term vision of sustainability and then allow others with a different agenda with no factual data to disregard it by disseminating self-serving information, how silly.
I have not counted the bears I have seen over the years, however as a mountain hunter who hunts and has hunted in grizzly territory for more than 30 years I can advise that in the mountains I hunt, grizzly populations are thriving. Last spring, on a grizzly hunt, my partner and I spotted 19 different grizzlies in one valley; while sheep hunting we spotted seven different bears; on a remote horse-back moose hunt we spotted 11 different grizzlies. These were different mountain ranges miles and miles apart, but they all share one same commonality; they are all prime grizzly bear territory. In my opinion the biggest threat to grizzly bears, past, present and future is not hunting, it is human encroachment. Grizzlies need space, go to those places and you will see lots of grizzlies. We need to apply factual data to long term management strategies to saving grizzly bear territories, for without wild spaces grizzly bears will not survive.
D. Smith
Prince George
