I write in response to the column written by Reps. Mike Shaw and Aaron Libby (Sept. 7).
As a retired hunter, I expect fish and game department officials to promote hunting in order to bring in revenue to the department and state from residents and non-residents. But I wish they would be a little more selective in the practices they encourage.
One of my most disgusting experiences as a hunter was seeing an out-of-state hunter purchase a bear and drag it around on his car until it almost fell apart. He came every year and I am sure he provided some “baiter” a good source of revenue.
Bear baiters have helped create the so-called “nuisance bears” by habituating bears to doughnuts and other human sources of food and calling them to these caches of food permeated by the smell of humans. The bears develop a taste for doughnuts and lose their wariness of the human scent.
Left to themselves, bears eat mostly berries, other plant sources and small animals. They may occasionally take a game animal but that is the natural order of things. Eliminating baiting will help to keep bears from seeking food near human habitation.
Shaw and Libby claim the bear population will explode — how many people in Maine have actually seen a black bear? That is a treat that I have experienced only twice in my life.
We used to call baiters “lazy hunters.” Bears are hard to hunt and, without the food attraction, they will stay away from humans, if possible. Eliminating bear baiting will require hunters to actually “hunt” for black bears.
None of the laws are written in stone. If needs change, the laws can be adjusted. I would have given Rep. Shaw more credibility if he had stated up front that he was on the Fish and Game Committee for the Legislature. His bias is apparent. Like the gun lobbyists, he would have the public believe that reasonable people don’t want to make the laws better, they only want to eliminate them (and then the sky will fall). His logic is full of contradictions and hysteria.
Their figure of 31,000 is not “a huge and growing population” of bears in a state such as Maine.
Although I respect Maine’s wildlife biologists, they haven’t done a stellar job of producing results. They can’t. They can’t require landowners to open their lands to the public; they can’t control the food supply; they can’t control those who break the law; they can’t control population pressure on wildlife.
I understand their bias but I can’t accept their predictions, as Reps. Shaw and Libby appear to do.
Marilyn Burgess, Leeds
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