“People move to Florida to be around nature, so many cities in the state have said we actually do want nature here, and if you kill all the animals, you in many respects kill the reason we moved here”, said Karl Nurse of the St. Petersburg City Council.
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According to the News-Journal, the new proposal would be broken into three, four-day periods with hunters getting permits on a first-come, first-served basis to specific dates and areas. The Jacksonville resident said she didn’t know about last year’s hunt until today, and while she agrees animals need protection, she doesn’t know if banning hunting is the answer.
Nearly two dozen protesters marched through Waterfront Park in Clermont on Saturday to denounce a possible statewide black bear hunt.
“We have a few left from last year’s hunt”, said Charles Larry Quinn, owner of American Sportsman Taxidermy.
The FWC held a bear hunt last year, for the first time in 20 years. The staff report does not yet establish what the agency calls “the harvest objective” – the number of bears that could be killed. He believes the state’s bear population is still growing. The scientists caution that the FWC should postpone further bear hunting until a more detailed population viability analysis based on age-specific survival and reproductive rates can be conducted to assess the stability of bear populations and their capacity to sustain certain levels of hunting mortality.
The hunt was scheduled to last a week but was halted after two days because of what FWC called unexpected hunter success. Allowing the hunt to continue as it did in 2015, coupled with roadkill numbers, the killing of nuisance bears and poaching, “may well plunge multiple subpopulations into sharp decline”, the scientists warn.
FWC staff’s latest recommendation include forbidding bear hunting near feeders used to lure deer and reducing areas open to hunting.
But a conservation group, Stop the Florida Bear Hunt, doubts those changes will make much of a difference.
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But agency data through the first week of June show sharp drops in roadkill bears and conflict bear over the same period past year.
