When bears and people mix, it's the bears who pay the price--usually with their lives. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has extended the hunting season on New Jersey bears, in part because Christie's staff actually saw a bear. Horror! The new law on black bear hunting allows hunters to take twice as many bears.
Though black bears are not considered endangered, they have been squeezed out of most of their original habitat. Forests used to cover most of North America. Now those forest spaces are small and fragmented, tempting bears into the suburbs where they meet with the outrage of the species that stole their land.
Killing bears is not just, nor is it a good solution to keeping them away from tract housing. In general, bears would prefer not to mix with people, but people feed bears or leave their garbage accessible, and that makes starving bears more courageous about approaching houses in the suburbs. Please join me in demanding that Christie do more to educate the public not to feed bears or leave garbage unsecured. We also need to ask Christie to implement aversion programs in New Jersey to correct the behavior of bears that are found wandering in human neighborhoods.
Dear Mr. Christie:
We the undersigned disagree with your recent move to expand the hunting season on black bears. They were here first. We encroached on their habitat, not vice versa. While we understand that black bears are not officially endangered, we still uphold their right to inhabit at least a part of their original stomping grounds. Your program of killing bears is not the right approach to keeping them away from people. Education is key here. You need to educate your constituents not to feed bears or leave their garbage unsecured. There are also effective aversion programs that can be used to retrain bears to be scared of humans. Please implement one of these programs in your state to rehabilitate bears that have wandered into human settlements.
