Florida Anti-Hunting Activists Hope to Mess With State’s Bear Hunt

I live in Southwest Georgia. In my neck of the woods, we have bears up well north of us, and we have them south of us in Florida, but none here where I am.

I’ve never gotten a chance to hunt bear. I wish I could, but it’s just not in the cards without some travel, which I rarely have time to do.

Florida having bears still strikes me as weird, though. Still, they have a few, and they have a carefully managed hunt. Not a lot of people get to hunt bear as it is, and now it seems anti-hunting activists want to try and screw that up.

Chuck O’Neal told USA Today, “Never in my life did I think I’d be a hunter.” O’Neal plans to buy a Florida bear permit and enter the lottery to get a tag, citing Florida’s recent constitutional amendment preserving the right to hunt.

So far, so good, right? New people hunting is always a good thing for the sport and for wildlife as a whole, so this sure sounds like good news.

The problem is that O’Neal and a bunch of his buddies on social media have no interest in actually hunting.

“I must admit, I’m not a good marksman. I may kill a bear with kindness,” O’Neal said.

But no, he and his buddies may well kill bears with their good intentions.

See, we manage game numbers through hunting. This prevents all kinds of other issues, such as overpopulation of the species. For deer, this keeps them from eating so much of farmers’ crops or running out in front of cars quite so often.

With bears, though, there’s a lot more to it. 

While bears aren’t notorious for eating crops, they do try to cross roads and can be hit by cars. They can also decide to hit up people’s trash cans when food is scarce. Human-bear interactions are a thing, and while wildlife experts in Florida told USA Today that hunting has little impact on that, I’m not sure I can buy that. The more bears, the greater the chance of an interaction, especially a harmful one.

That includes the fact that bears are bigger and potentially meaner than people. While they’ll often run from a person, if one is feeling particularly ornery, then things can go sideways really quickly. 

So while O’Neal and company think they’re protecting bears, they might be endangering people while also creating an environment that’s far from beneficial for the animals in question.

Luckily, with the fact that there is a lottery, there’s a very good chance that none of them will win a tag. Sure, they can apparently enter as often as they like, but it costs $5 per pop. I strongly suspect a lot of the people claiming they’re going to take part are too broke to actually do so, especially as an out-of-state bear license costs more than $151 as well, and must be purchased first.

That doesn’t negate the outright stupidity on display, though.

Of course, no one ever accused anti-hunting folks of being intelligent.