Reprinted from a June 3, 2007 column in the Morgantown Dominion Post
Three weeks ago my good bowhunting friend, Bob DeLaney from Connecticut, hunted polar bears near Resolute Bay, in the northern Canadian Province of Nunavut. He saw fourteen polar bears the first day!!! Bob indicated that in the four days he bowhunted, he saw numerous sows with cubs, and lots of old boars.
The Inuits guide hunters for polar bears, while the Canadian government controls the quotas. In the area where Bob hunted, the 2007 quota for non residents was twenty bears and the Inuits could harvest another fifteen. While Bob was there, the government raised the Inuit quota to twenty-two because of the over population of polar bears.
In the early 1970's the polar bear population across the far North was 10,000. Today those estimates are 24,000. Interesting then that a federal bill has just been introduced in Congress that would ban Americans from importing polar bears taken on hunting trips to Canada. This would devastate the polar bear management programs in Canada and would also hurt the Inuits who gain economic benefits from American tourists who go there to hunt.
Hunting polar bears does not lead to huge kills. Only eighty Americans a year go to Canada for polar bears, but those few hunters create $2.4 million for bear research, conservation, and native communities. There are a few localities where bear numbers are down, but in most areas, bears are either growing in number or stable. If that is true (and it is), why has this bill been introduced?
The polar bear has become the poster child of the Al Gore led discussions and political expansion of global warming. Type "research institutes studying global warming" into your Google search engine and you get page after page of discussions on the causes of global warming, the existence of global warming, the lack of evidence that the cause is man, and other discussions on evidence that global warming is caused by man.
That concern, and the dire predictions made, has led to a fear for the survival of polar bears. Understand that data do not support this fear, yet to appease environmental groups concerned about global warming, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list polar bears as a threatened species. Maybe Arctic sea ice is declining as Al Gore predicts. I don’t know. Maybe there will be a problem in one hundred years. I have no crystal ball (as Al Gore apparently has). However, polar bears are doing fine and to list them as "threatened" makes no sense at all. In fact, that proposal has led to the introduction of this bill to ban the import of polar bears, thus, essentially banning polar bear hunting.
Banning polar bear hunting will not change global warming, or the causes of global warming, whatever they may be. Yet the National Wildlife Federation supports the listing. I don’t get it. Polar bears are intensely managed. Numbers are healthy. If, indeed, we see a decline, then something would be done.
While it is true that two subpopulations are supposedly down in numbers (there are data that refute this however), does this mean that we should take a step that would hurt Inuit natives? The proposal to list polar bears as threatened comes from a loss of habitat and prey due to global warming. Yet the Inuits state that seal numbers (prey for the bears) are extremely healthy. And in one of the supposed affected areas, from 2000 to 2006, the temperature has declined by 3.95 degrees. In the second area, the temperature has gone down 6.86 degrees. True, the temperatures there are still not as cold as they were in the early 1970's, but the trend is down.
As a further indication that this proposed listing is driven by politics and pressure rather than data, consider that the Yellowstone grizzly bear lives in less than one percent of its former home range, yet the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service just down listed it from the endangered list because numbers were up.
When a species is listed as "threatened," that means that the species might become extinct within the "foreseeable" future in a "significant portion" of its range. That doesn’t seem to be the trend relative to polar bears.
My friend wrote the following. "If U. S. Hunters cannot bring their hides and skulls back to the United States, the Inuits will suffer dramatically in my opinion. Based on my experience in the Arctic, the polar bear issue is a political issue, not an issue based on the best scientific facts available."
Don’t get me wrong. If bear numbers start to decline, if seal numbers (their prey) start to decline, then I’m all for taking drastic action. However, to do it now by passing this bill and/or listing polar bears as threatened (both actions would eliminate hunting and management) natives and bears will suffer.
