Today is the day Kermode bears, grizzlies, & other black bears have their picnic!
SIDNEY, British Columbia, Canada––Hunters for British Columbia, the Guide Outfitters Association of British Columbia, and the British Columbia Wildlife Federation gnashed their teeth when the Raincoast Conservation Foundation on January 4, 2024 announced that after two years of fundraising, it “has secured the funds to purchase the Southern Great Bear commercial trophy hunting tenure – which covers more than a quarter of the Great Bear Rainforest,” a region stretching from about halfway up the Georgia Strait to southeast Alaska.
Owning the Southern Great Bear Rainforest hunting tenure, meaning hunting rights, acquired in perpetuity, will cost the Raincoast Conservation Foundation nearly $2 million: $1,920,000 to be exact.
Deal protects “Spirit Bears”
The deal protects the rare Kermode black bear, or “Spirit Bear,” among many other species, a black bear regional variant that may be either black or a cream-colored off white.
The white bears are already protected under British Columbia law, but killing the black bears––who are indistinguishable from other black bears––diminishes the isolated gene pool from which the white bears emerge.
Altogether, about 1,400 black bears are believed to carry the “white bear” gene, but only about 400 of those bears are actually white.
“The purchase of the Southern Great Bear Rainforest tenure gives Raincoast exclusive commercial trophy hunting rights in the region,” the Raincoast Conservation Foundation exulted in a media release.
“Now, Raincoast is the largest tenure holder in the province, with six tenures,” together totaling 34,720 square miles,” the Raincoast Conservation Foundation said.
(Raincoast Conservation Foundation maps.)
First Nations landholders help
The acquisition of the Southern Great Bear Rainforest hunting rights, like previous Raincoast Conservation Foundation acquisitions, has been accomplished with the cooperation of the First Nations landholders.
The Great Bear Rainforest was officially recognized by the government of British Columbia and placed under First Nations management in February 2016, as part of an agreement to permanently protect 85% of the old-growth forested area within the coastal rainforest from commercial logging.
“We purchase these tenures with a more sustainable economy in mind – wildlife viewing and ecotourism,” explained Raincoast Conservation Foundation executive director Chris Genovali.
“Within the Southern Great Bear tenure alone,” Genovali said, “there are more than 19 ecotourism operations that have established businesses which rely on wildlife viewing.”
Bears worth 12 times more alive than dead
The Raincoast Conservation Foundation strategy proceeds from a Stanford University study done in 2014 in the Great Bear Rainforest, which found that grizzly bear viewing produced 12 times the revenue, employed 27 times more people, and generated 11 times more economic benefits than bear hunting. Bear viewing has continued to grow exponentially since then.
The Raincoast Conservation Foundation began buying hunting rights around British Columbia in 2005, after a 2001 moratorium on grizzly bear hunting approved by the New Democratic Party government then in office was overturned when the Liberal Party won the next election.
The New Democratic Party regained the British Columbia parliamentary majority in 2017, and again banned grizzly bear hunting.
At least 10 “trophy” species benefit
Raincoast Conservation Foundation guide outfitter co-ordinator Brian Falconer explained, however, that the foundation has continued to acquire hunting rights to protect many other species, along with bears.
Falconer said the Raincoast Conservation Foundation will continue its efforts to purchase hunting rights because there are many other species the group can protect by controlling hunting tenures.
“Literally hundreds of animals every year, including particularly the trophy species like grizzly bear, black bear, wolves, and cougars––the real trophy species, are not being killed now,” Falconer said.
“We just have very, very poor hunters”
Also protected by the Raincoast Conservation Foundation acquisition of Great Bear Rainforest hunting rights are Dall’s sheep, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, elk, Sitka deer, and caribou.
“We are required to do hunts in order to maintain these territories at this point,” Falconer admitted to Chuck Chiang of Canadian Press.
“We’ve been very unsuccessful at those hunts, and so the harvest rate has gone down to zero in those properties. We just have very, very poor hunters.”
Meanwhile, Falconer said, the Rainforest Conservation Association “is lighting the path to a new, conservation-based economy that is not dependent on killing and extracting things.”
Elsewhere, B.C. government culls wolves
The Rainforest Conservation Foundation announcement of the Great Bear Rainforest hunting rights purchase came two weeks after CBC News investigative reporter Michelle Morton on December 21, 2023 revealed that, “The British Columbia government has spent more than $10 million on a controversial wolf cull launched in 2015, according to documents obtained through a freedom of information request filed by CBC News.”
The British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land & Resource Stewardship began killing wolves by helicopter gunnery in 2015.
The ministry “said the cull would be a short-term measure aimed at conserving threatened woodland caribou herds while it also worked to restore critical habitat,” Morton recalled.
“A total of 1,944 wolves have been killed since 2015,” Morton learned.
Culling wolves does not help declining caribou
During the same years, the caribou population, which was believed to be as high as 40,000 in the early 20th century, continued to drop, from about 17,000 in 2015 to as few as 15,000 now.
At that rate, killing all 8,500 wolves left in British Columbia would fall far short of restoring the 13 British Columbia caribou herds.
More than 30 years of aggressive wolf-culling in Alaska and Alberta have comparably failed to bring caribou numbers back up.
The primary cause of caribou population decline in Alaska, Alberta, and British Columbia is increasingly obviously habitat loss due to various effects of global warming, together with over-hunting, but since hunters vote while caribou and wolves do not, the science of the decline has long tended to be pushed aside in political decision-making.
(See Strychnine for Christmas: Alberta gift to wolves, caribou & other wildlife.)
Public is opposed, but culling goes ahead anyway
Currently, Morton reported, the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land & Resource Stewardship “sets a goal of reducing the wolf population in targeted areas by 80%. This includes the elimination of entire packs so that the wolf population density is below three wolves per 1,000 square kilometers,” equal to about 620 square miles.
“When the wolf cull program was launched in 2015,” Morton said, “the province promised to launch a review after five years.
“That happened in 2021 when the province launched a survey seeking feedback on the program from the public.
“Of 15,196 surveys completed, 59% of respondents were opposed to predator reduction for caribou recovery, while 37% were in support, according to results published online.”
Wolf-culling was then “quietly renewed by the province in the winter of 2021-22,” Morton continued, and is “expected to continue through 2026 with an annual budget of up to $1.8 million and an expected 244 additional wolves killed every year.”
“This is simply a war on wildlife”
Added Morton, “Forty-six images of the wolf cull were released to [the activist organization] Pacific Wild last spring, but there are at least 600 images and 14 videos that are still being held back by the British Columbia government.
“The most recent Freedom of Information request released information regarding only 330 of the wolves killed since 2015, a small fraction of the total. The province continues to withhold documents that would allow for an independent assessment of the ‘humane’ nature of the wolf cull.”
Commented Pacific Wild campaigner Mollie Cameron, “This is simply a war on wildlife. Killing wolves will not bring back threatened caribou. Caribou and wolves have lived alongside each other for millennia, but clearcut logging, oil and gas drilling, pipelines, mining and other industrial intrusions are new threats that caribou cannot withstand.”
B.C. culls black bears too
The British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land & Resource Stewardship, specifically the Conservation Officer Service, also continues to aggressively cull black bears who come into proximity to humans: 555 in 2020, 581 in 2021, 151 in August 2023 alone.
“Between 2015 and 2022, 4,279 bears in British Columbia have been put down by conservation officers,” reported Cheryl Chan of the Vancouver Sun in June 2023.
More than 1,000 of those bears were killed in the vicinity of just eight communities.
British Columbia claims a total black bear population of 120,000 to 150,000, of whom as many as 14,000 may inhabit the Great Bear Rainforest.
Thanks to the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, those bears at least are not at risk of culling.
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