Bears often wander into residential areas to raid garbage bins, bird feeders and barbecue pits for snacks.
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Commissioners began considering a hunt in the wake of four bear attacks on women, three of them in Central Florida’s suburbs and one in a rural Panhandle area.
The first bear to be killed was a lactating female.
He said his bullet pierced through the animal’s abdomen allowing for a quick death. The scales are mandatory for the bear check-in stations. Twelve and 15 bears were killed in those regions Saturday. If the kill quota is reached early, the FWC claims it will end the hunt before October 30, but not before two days have passed. Wildlife officers are examining all killed bears’ teeth, using measuring tape around its midsection and taking DNA samples for a databank.
A spokesman for the Sportsmen’s Alliance group said hunts are necessary because “there have been so many predators and they’re not as controlled as they should be”.
Amanda Holmes, 23, said she spotted the bear 200 yards from her tree stand, and brought it down with her Remington. Hunters will be able to hunt bears on a dozen WMAs in this unit, and the harvest objective in this BMU is also 100 bears.
Robert Smith has had the same tree stand in the forest for over a decade.
“They’ve had plenty of opportunity to do the bear proof trashcans before”.
A bear attacked a man outside a motel in Florida on Friday evening, according to the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which is investigating the incident.
“The basic problem with a few of these bears is they’re just roaming around…they tear stuff up”, she said. However, the FWC emphasized the fact that the hunt was timed in such a way that the newborns would be at least 8-9 months old, which is old enough to survive on their own.
The long anticipated deer hunting season opens for Florida’s zone D hunters Saturday, but don’t break out your guns just yet because bow hunters get the first shot. While public opinion is important, we have a responsibility to weigh the scientific information, professional experience, cost effectiveness and practical feasibility when choosing the most appropriate means to manage sustainable, healthy bear populations with priority concern for human safety and other public interests.
“Hunting’s a good tool to stabilize populations because it’s really the only effective tool we have for managing these growing populations at large scale”, Diane Eggeman, division director for Florida’s hunting and game management agency, told the Associated Press. “And here, it’s the bears that take the hit”.
“We had a lot of hunters signup. You are saying to take out a certain percentage of the population, but you do not even know how much of a population we have”, said Nicole Cordano, who organized the protest at Tampa’s Lykes Gaslight Park.
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“All eyes in Florida and beyond will be on you”, it read.
