... and is it fair for bear hunters to use pizza bait?

The Times
From Tim Reid in Washington



AS AMERICANS head to the polls today, they will not just be choosing a President or a local senator.

In Alaska they will also be deciding whether to become the first state to legalise smoking marijuana; in Maine whether to stop hunters tempting bear with pizzas; and in South Carolina, whether to keep barmen serving spirits from minibottles.

In addition to the business of picking a Commander-in-Chief and hundreds of congressmen, voters in 34 states will also be deciding the fate of 163 local ballot initiatives, ranging from gay marriage and taxation to one in Colorado that could even determine the outcome of the presidential race.

Colorado’s Amendment 36 is one of this year’s most controversial and potentially far-reaching initiatives. Like nearly all the other states, Colorado awards all its nine presidential electoral college votes just to the winner, leaving the loser with none. Voters are being asked to decide whether to award those electoral votes on a proportional basis.
More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1340410,00.html

on it. I want a long island iced tea with 6 oz of booze!

The other interesting thing about SC is that you can't have a liquor store sign. Instead you place a giant red polka dot sign on the building. Huge red dot = booze.

But i know here in Pa but people can put out salt licks for only a certain time period but have to bring them in I don't like the idea of baiting them kinda takes the sport out of it. Id think i don't agree with hunting but then again we do have over population of deer in areas around here and they have an bad effect on the environment.

Hunting is not effective population control, it's a blood sport.

I don't hunt i mean if it was necessary for food sure but it isn't
basically it's to get the trophy or a right of passage in some cases.
it never really appealed to me.
The environmental problems with the deer are they eat all the new growth trees ( there leaves) and damage other ones if that food source runs out also they eat lots of farmers crops and if you drive around here it's like running through a gauntlet of them ( at night )
The problem with exponential human population growth is a big problem that, with our encroachment on the environment and our ever increasing energy needs it will certainly be our downfall Its like burning the candle at both ends.

there are fewer natural predators(i.e. wolves) where the deer roam free, causing huge overpopulations of deer, leading to starvation and disease among the animal populations due to insufficient food sources for all the extra deer.
hunting the animals is MUCH more humane than allowing them to slowly starve to death.

I used to work for a guy whose philosophy on this was that the mountain lions were too stupid to be up to the job. They would kill a deer and only eat part of it, so the rangers would have to go pick up the half eaten deer and get rid of them and the cats would then go kill another deer. He wanted the job of killing the stupid extra mountain lions. Being the cats were so stupid the deer were about to overrun the country (we live in Los Angeles) so it was also necessary for mighty hunters and survivors like unto himself to kill as many of the extra deer as possible. The gummint was begging him to take this job.
These are the people who feel qualified to control Nature.

then bait is one of the most effective ways to harvest bear. I hunt in Wisconsin where we have a large population of black bear and numerous nuisance bear reports throughout the year. Bait is allowed here but the kind of bait and how it is placed is regulated. I'm not up much on Maine's bear population but last I heard it was pretty low.

How do you plant them?

of making what they do sound peaceful and in tune with nature, rather than just a bunch of guys shooting guns off and killing animals.

~23,000 animals.

It's also one of the few states that still allows bears to be trapped.

I was thinking I must have heard wrong.

Man what you got in store for you, too bad, just too damn bad.

And yet, nothing. :shrug:

Yeah, I'm quaking in my boots for sure. I guess I'd better go back to eating caged chickens and fenced cows doped up on hormones and antibiotics. That's much better for the animals and the environment. What was I thinking?

I know you said you didn't hunt so this is addressed to the next person that puts SPORT and hunting defenseless wild animals in the same sentence.
You want SPORT when hunting deer or other animals? OK strip naked, chase the deer down and strangle him to death....now that's what I call SPORT.
Last time I hunted was 1972...US Army....not ever again. The only thing keeps me from stalking then shooting a couple of hunters in the ass (just a little flesh wound)every year is my dear wife.....she seems to be my only grip on sanity lately.

Wild animals have a better sense of smell than you do. They have better eyesight. Better hearing. They know the terrain better than you do--they're out in it all the time. They run faster. They're camouflaged. And if we're talking bears, they can kill people.

My father has been a big-game hunter specializing in elk and deer for probably 50 years. He's killed six elk and nine deer in his life.

and extra pepperoni

... in which case you need to use a pic-a-nic basket, right Boo-Boo?

That's cruel . . .

Evidently, baiting here is for population control. One of the issues with Maine is that we are also the only state to allow trapping. The referendum here is against trapping, baiting, and dog hunting (i.e., using dogs to chase down the bear). The advertisement campaign against the referendum has been fairly effective at addressing the needs for baiting as a means of population control. They don't address the fact that other states that have banned baiting haven't had a subsequent increase in bear population. My guess is that the referendum will fail because the anti referendum folks ran a much better ad campaign -- but a pure anti-trapping referendum would have probably passed. It will probably be close but earlier polling shows the referendum going down...too lazy to look for the link.

--JT

Most of the baiting is done by guides for out-of-state clients.

I some parts of northern Maine there are baited stands every few hundred yards on logging roads.

It's not population control - it's big business in some pars of the state.

According to them, bears are running rampant over the population, creating a safety hazard. Well, if there's so many god damn bears, why the hell do you need to bait and trap them? Just go out and unload with your assault rifle.

There is always an alternative solution!



The greatness of a nation and it's moral progress can be judged by the way it's animals are treated. - Ghandi

SOP behaviour for those assholes

What are they thinking?

I'd rather feast on an animal that had a free life than caged chickens and fenced cows. To each his own, I guess, unless you're an asshole.

Is a good thing. In fact, State Wildlife agencies operating under the guise of "wildlife control" are doing nothing but perpetuating the over-population of a game species through habitat feeding programs and baited fields. Wilflife is essentially a served up market for hunters and the states where hunting is popular has managed to place people into positions of power to advance such agendas.

This is why in places like California where caution is always taken when say...an animal attacks a person. The individual animal will be destroyed, but the elected officials don't send hoodlums with guns to shoot everything in sight either. In other states, if a Cougar had killed someone, we'd have a posse' of about 3,000 "warriors' with guns to "cull" the population.

In the end, the goal is to increase potential head count for hunters. Given certain environmental conditions, animals will move toward a natural equalibrium of population. Humans have NEVER been shown to have the ability to "manage" wildlife populations, let alone from the point of a gun.

The more deer (or whatever) that over-populate the more "run ins" with said animals, either through property destruction or via auto accidents. This creates sympathy for the "hunting is a viable population control" claptrap and away we go.

I hold no hope though, because generally speaking people don't give a shit about truth when it comes to ecology.

OK by me.

Along with legalizing pot and disallowing a governor to chose his daughter to replace himself in the Senate.

You are gonna run out of bait before you see a bear.

...cottonmouth is the deciding factor here..gotta remember to pace yourself...

The place I go fishing at in Canada use donuts for bear bait. They buy day old donuts from Tim Horton's. I am surprised the bears eat them. The fresh donuts suck, much less day old ones. I fail to see any sport in shooting a baited animal. We always ask the hunters which kind they got them on Jelly, or cream filled. We always razz them when they are taking photos, tell them to whipe the cream filling off of the bears mouth first.

woods and swing by frequently to fill it with donuts. The bears fall in to a pattern with this regular food source and then one day some flatlander (our endearing name for people south of the ME border ;)) shows up with a wad of money and a gun and blows the bear away.

I am absolutely amazed that this initiative will not pass. It's another example of BS fear tactics for the masses since there has never been a bear attack in Maine's history.

Back in the spring a bear was found roaming the streets of South Portland. It was obviously released by the bear hunting crowd to create a sense of panic in the urbanites. The bear was quickly shot to death. What a @#$ waste.

that they deliberately put out...

Despite the fact that two state-wide referenda voted it down, Republicans (surprised?) are sponsoring two bills (HB208 and SB155) that would reinstate the same-day permits that Frank Murkowski granted last year.

In a lot of cases, they use helicopters to run the wolves down until they fall to the ground in exhaustion - then the chopper lands, the 'hunter' gets out and shoots the exhausted animal.

So the rednecks are wanting to solve the riddle for once and for all = Does a bear eat pizza in the woods?