More than 200 bears have been killed in Florida in a single day after the state allowed the hunting of the animals for the first time in 21 years.
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Meanwhile, protesters were out at those hunt check in stations, singing and praying for the the hunt to come to an end.
Hunters were given the chance to kill up to 320 bears throughout the state.
Bear populations are robust enough to tolerate the relatively short hunt, officials said. Central Florida and the Eastern Panhandle reached their quotas by Saturday evening, and all hunting in those two regions were halted.
Chuck O’Neal, director of the Seminole County group Speak Up Wekiva, which failed earlier this month to persuade a circuit judge to block the hunt, said the agency needs to first determine if the hunt “adversely impacted” the state’s black-bear population. Twelve and 15 bears were killed in those regions Saturday. She was killed on private land.
The agency will notify hunters who provided contact information of season closures through text messages and emails but is also tasking them with the responsibility of knowing whether the season has closed before heading into the woods. This science-based, carefully regulated hunt will help ensure proper balance of bear populations relative to available habitat and other management objectives while still supporting healthy bear numbers. It is not easy to watch.
Those who killed a bear after that time had 12 hours to check the carcass at any of the various Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission check stations. Weeks before the season began, hunters scouted locations on foot, with trail cameras, and using Google Earth.
However, animal rights activists have criticised the hunts as cruel and ineffective.
The hunt is open for one week, and hunters are not allowed to shoot bears that weight less than 100 pounds, or that have cubs.
The issue of a number of lactating females, which were taken, brought up questions of cubs and their survival.
“They do a lot of damage on the property”, he said. The hunt was originally planned to last a week.
The first bear hunt in Florida since 1994 drew 3,778 people to buy permits.
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Those two regions by far had the most hunters, with Central Florida attracting an estimated 2,000. The group says that the weeklong hunt is likely to take a higher number of bears than the quota set by wildlife managers, because hunters receive little oversight. An effective way to curb bears’ increasing penchant to prowl in populated areas/neighborhoods for food, or just a ruthless excuse to shoot defenseless animals who have only recently rebounded from threatened status?
