Despite fatal attack, wildlife advocates outraged over Florida bear hunt revival

Yahoo

19-05-2025

Florida is on the cusp of having an annual and regulated bear hunt that environmentalists and wildlife advocates likened to "barbarism" and say is informed by "outdated data."
At a December Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) meeting after receiving an update on the commission's bear management plan, board chair Rodney Barreto told staff to develop a bear hunting option for commissioners to consider.
Five months later, the option is ready for a public hearing. And it comes not long after the first fatal Florida bear attack ever recorded.
The FWC said it was developed with input from four virtual public meetings. Once it was published, a public comment period for the proposal was open for three days – May 14-16.
The 31 pages of rules include a 23-day bear season this December and, starting in 2026, annual bear hunting between the first of October and the end of December.
Commissioners will consider the rules at their May 21-22 quarterly meeting in Ocala, with a final vote expected in August.
Morgan Richardson, the FWC's director of hunting and game management said the rules create 'a conservative, well-regulated hunt' to manage the bear population.
But opponents like James C. Scott of Speak Up for Wildlife said they 'are riddled with contradictions and sloppy math."
Scott has more than a half-dozen objections to the proposal including the FWC reliance on data that is at least a decade old to decide whether the bear population is healthy enough to sustain a hunt.
'It is outdated data. This proposal was advanced and inspired by the appointees on the commission, not the scientists, not the agency staff,' Scott said.
The FWC's Bear Management Coordinator Mike Orlando said the agency is relying on figures from 2015, which he characterizes as 'conservative.' 'We don't detect any decreasing (numbers statewide),' Orlando told the Naples Daily News.
The Florida black bear, a distinct subspecies of the American black bear, was listed as a threatened species as recently as 2012; the population had dwindled to about 500 in the mid-1970s and has rebounded to an estimated 4,000 today.
Florida ended an annual bear hunt in 1994.
A week-long hunt was attempted in 2015 but was closed after two days when hunters had killed 300 of the 320 bears allotted for harvest.
The proposal that will be considered in Ocala divides the state into seven "Bear Management Units" and declares any area with more than 200 bears a "Bear Harvest Zone" – there is no cap on how many bears can be taken from one BMU.
Hunting permits would be issued through a random drawing and cost $100 for a Florida resident and $300 for anyone else; 187 permits would be issued this year.
A permit holder can bring along one guest hunter. If hunting with dogs, a permit holder may bring along nine guests. A permit allows its holder or party to kill one bear. And the number of bears taken (or the number of permits issued) each year would be up to the FWC's executive director.
The rules allow hunters to lure bears with food and kill them while they eat, to use packs of dogs to run them to exhaustion, and to skip check-in stations after a bear has been taken.
'This isn't wildlife management. It's not modern wildlife management. It's barbarism codified. There's no need for this and these rules are not in line with the black bear management plan adopted in 2019,' Scott said.
Amendment 2 approved by voters last November makes hunting the preferred means of managing wildlife populations.
The discussion in Ocala about bear hunting comes after the first death from a Florida bear attack that is known. An 89-year-old man was killed in Collier County earlier in May.
While generally shy and tend to avoid people, bears are food-driven and the bear in the Collier incident appears to have been frequently attracted by garbage in the neighborhood. FWC lists securing garbage as the biggest bear deterrent.
The Collier bear was found by wildlife officers and euthanized. Human bear encounters have increased in recent years as residential subdivisions are built in what once was undeveloped land.
Nuisance bear calls increased from 2,000 in 2016 to more than 6,000 in 2024, according to the FWC.
'As the bear population grows and development occurs, we are probably going to see more bears move into developed areas. So that's one reason we want to try to manage bear population growth,' Richardson explained at the start of the first virtual meeting for the new bear hunting rules.
A substantial majority of Floridians, however, are opposed to a bear hunting season.
An April Naples Daily News poll, taken before the Collier bear attack, showed 92% opposing the hunt with 8% in favor.
A Remington Research survey commissioned by Humane World for Animals found 89% opposed to hunting bears with dogs.
Given those numbers, groups like Bear Warriors United, Bear Defenders, Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation are urging their members to show up at the FWC quarterly meeting in Ocala to ask commissioners to postponed consideration of a bear hunt until the population numbers are updated.
'This proposal is widely unpopular, riddled with contradictions, and not in alignment with FWC policy - we shouldn't even be discussing this until we have updated accurate population data,' Scott said.
Commissioners will discuss the proposal, then a vote to adopt the rules is expected at their August meeting, with the location to be determined.
James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at [e-mail] and is on X as @CallTallahassee.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Bear hunt returns? Florida faces uproar over new rules