With the spring bear hunt come articles in the newspapers and radio talk shows on the probity of killing bears. Environmentalists don’t like it. Hunters like it and they are supported by guides, outfitters, the Guide Outfitters Association, and the provincial government. What the hunters know and the conservationists don’t is that they are on the same side of a losing battle over conservation of wild lands and wildlife.
Meanwhile, as Larry Pynn (The Vancouver Sun, April 3) pointed out, the government raised the overnight fee for a camp site up to $30 per night. Add on reservation fees and buy a bundle of firewood and you are looking at $120 for three nights of camping. Does anyone not see how these are related?
Pynn quotes Environment Minister Barry Penner conceding that just 2.48 million people used BC Parks campgrounds in 2009, compared with 2.89 million in 1998, a 14% decline for the decade. Most people visiting our parks don’t even stay the night: overnight use has declined to about one-tenth of day use.
Not just here, but in the United States, Europe, and Japan, per capita visits to national parks, number of fishing and game hunting licenses, and time spent hiking or backpacking have all declined since about 1987. This worries resources management agencies because outdoor recreationists are their political constituency. Without public demand for wild land, natural scenery, wildlife viewing opportunities, and, yes, hunting and fishing opportunities, there will be no political will to protect them.
The trend is the same in Alberta. For example, although absolute numbers of visitors to Banff National Park tripled to four million (not counting those who simply drove through to other destinations) between 1970 and 2004, the number of people using the backcountry declined from a peak of 20,300 user nights annually in 1975 to 18,000 annually by 2004. Jasper National Park shows a similar trend.
A 2006 survey showed that, relative to the average Canadian pleasure traveller, visitors to British Columbia are especially likely to participate in nature-oriented activities (e.g., camping, canoeing and kayaking, horseback riding) but less likely to go fishing or hunting; and 53% of Canadian travellers to British Columbia stayed in a public campground. Tourists may stop at a casino while they are in British Columbia, but that is not what they come for. They come for nature, in all of its forms and products.
Through their license fees, hunters and sports fishers pay far more for habitat conservation than do most environmentalists as individuals. Their other expenditures are important to the economy, but are unevenly distributed throughout the province. In 2001, 18% (395 businesses) of all nature-based businesses in British Columbia operated in Northern BC (encompassing Prince George and Prince Rupert to the Yukon, Alaska and Alberta borders), but 47% (111) of guide-outfitters operated in this region. Guide-outfitters in the region generated $136.5 million in revenues in 2001.
The number of resident hunting licences in British Columbia peaked at 174,000 in 1981 and has declined ever since. The decline is not only in the number of hunters, but in the numbers of game that they take. Thus, the large-game harvest fell 27% after 1981, though most of the downturn occurred in the 1990s. Between 1992 and 2002, the resident harvest of big game species fell by 40%. The harvest of deer and moose fell sharply after 1992, by 47% and 13% respectively. The bighorn sheep and mountain goat harvest fell by 34%. Because of lower hunting pressure and healthy game populations, hunters have been expending fewer hunter-days per kill for deer, elk, moose, and caribou. These statistics haven’t escaped the notice of non-resident hunters, whose take has increased by more than 20% since 1992.The grizzly hunt, subject to ever-tighter wildlife management restrictions, fell 41% in the same period. However, since 1976, non-resident hunters have taken an increasing proportion of the total grizzly bears killed by hunters.
One area that bucks (no pun intended!) the downward trend is in the hunter kill of cougar and wolves. These predators specialize on deer, elk, and moose. With prey populations expanding, both in response to habitat changes (logging, fires, and land-clearing for agriculture) and to the lowered hunting pressure, the wolves and cougar have plenty to eat. In 1986, wolves re-colonized Banff National Park after a 30-year absence. About the same time, after a quarter century of never hearing their howls or seeing their tracks around my cabin in the Kootenays, I heard a wolf howl. My son, living there now, has heard them howl, and soon my grandchildren will. It is my fervent hope that wolves, grizzly bears, and cougars will always remain a feature of these forests.
Personally, I loathe the idea of killing large predators. I killed a bear once and swore I never would again. As a biologist who has radio-tagged grizzly bears and tracked them to and from their den sites, frankly, I came to love bears. .. black, white, or brown. There is no biological justification for hunting bears. But neither is there any biological reason to disallow hunting, as long as the hunter take is in line with the annual production (this is an open question, but one for another time). Neither is it a moral issue—or, if it is, it is one where we city-dwellers need to consider the rights and values of country-dwellers here and guests from abroad. We live in British Columbia, which has as fair a chunk of mountain wilderness, unrivalled for scenic beauty and large mammal diversity, as almost anywhere else on Earth. Although some 2.3 million of us live in the Greater Vancouver area, the other 1.6 million live in towns, villages and a handful of small cities scattered across the province. Many are First Nations trappers, ranchers and others who hunt for meat under aboriginal entitlements and, yes, who guide hunters for extra income in the fall. Many are business people who own outfits (a Crown land tenure for commercial hunting), sporting goods stores, cafes or motels that cater to resident and non-resident hunters. With nature-based recreation decreasing, and with the government discouraging the public from camping by setting exorbitant fees, we conservationists need all the friends we can get. Hunters are among them.
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