Bearly Remembered to Blog This...

Sorry about the pun. Actually, no, I'm not. Girlfriend has sent me back to blog - she is updating expensive new Palm Pilot - so there you go.

Anyhow, I've been meaning to blog about this for days: NZ Bear pointed out this Slate article about alternative ways to reduce the New Jersey black bear population - the current way, which is to shoot some of them, has been denounced by animal activists.

I happen to have grown up in New Jersey, as did my girlfriend. The state gets a bum rap sometimes for its ecology, but it is true that the bear population (not to mention the damn deer population, and especially not to mention the God damn all fu*king Canadian fu*king geese right to fu*king Hell population) is doing just fine, and it is not hard to get black bears to respect your property rights; it's fragging impossible unless you shoot some every so often. Don't get me wrong, I like bears - but these are, like, wild animals. If we could negotiate with them... well, if they were that smart our ancestors would probably have made them extinct, or vice versa (there's room for only one at the top of the food chain, bucko).

I also want to note that this quote:

"I fail to see how injecting an untested chemical, at speculative doses, into the testes of our majestic black bear population could possibly be considered humane," said Bradley M. Campbell, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, in a September statement.

- screams '.sig file' to me.

Comments

[Katherine]

It's odd, what's happening to the east coast. There's more forest cover in the Northeast than there was a century ago, and maybe a century before that. And now we've got predators back, which I guess is a natural consequence of the huge deer population. As well as bears in New Jersey, there are coyotes in a lot of New York and Connecticut. They've even been sighted in the Bronx. Not to mention the ones that ate my husband's family's sweet little cat.

I think it's a good thing overall. But they need to be controlled so they don't endanger people--if it can be done short of shooting them, great. I don't know enough about animal control to know if that's possible. If not, well, I know one little kitten that looks armed, dangerous and ready for vengeance....

[Timmy the Wonder Dog]

Hunting deer and bears is sound way to manage the population. With regards to the damn CG, the shaking of eggs and the liberal application of border collies and australian shephards works wonders.