Now, if you want to read hysterical nonsense, please go to the original youtube of this video and read the comments! If the animal rightsniks had their way, I guess these hunters should have just let that sow kill and maim a couple of people.
Now, you can eat these bears. I have heard that Alaskan brown bear meat is a bit fishy. I’ve eaten black bear meat. It’s actually really good, if it’s prepared correctly. We had a bear barbecue at 4-H camp when I was boy, and I loved it.
These bears are not endangered. The subspecies that lives in the Lower 48, the grizzly, is endangered. However, it is endangered only in the Lower 48.
This species has what is called a “Holarctic” distribution. That means that it is found in the Palearctic (Europe and Asia, except for Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Subcontinent) and Nearctic (All of North America north of the Valley of Mexico, except for Florida). Wolves, red foxes, mallard ducks, and brown bears have a Holarctic distribution.
The brown bear (Ursus arctos) is the most numerous bear on the planet. Certain subspecies, like the Grizzly in the Lower 48 and the European brown bear, are not doing well. However, as a species, they are doing far better than giant pandas and spectacled bears.
There is nothing wrong with hunting bears. Such activities do provide income for people and more funds for conservation. It is also a legitimate way to appreciate nature and connect with a world from which so many of us are horribly alienated. This alienation gives people a false impression about what life is really like for most other creatures.
We would rather believe it is a sanitized version of our own lives, free from the artifical constraints and technology that so drive our lives. However, those constraints and technology make our lives so much easier. The other creatures lack those constraints and technology, and their lives are really not so nice. Nature is a much tougher judge than any in our courts.
Nature is not Bambi. Nature is a cruel selector. Death is its quality control device.
It might seem cruel to shoot a bear, but being shoot is a lot less painful than having the bear die a natural death. And a big killer of these bears is other bears. And when bears kill each other, it’s not with a single swift blow. It’s usually a nasty event with lots of blood and gore, and the bear that dies usually doesn’t die instantly.
This is why you practice. Fell a huge bear at medium range with a long range weapon on difficult terrain with your life (or your friend’s) on the line, while it charges at great speed and you are trying to shoo it away.
Although seemingly similar to the Lion hunting video I posted a while back, this doesn’t strike me as a bunch of yahoos being dicks and almost getting killed.
Perhaps it’s because they felled this bear in one clean shot, dead. And perhaps they did it before the bear was on top of them. And perhaps because they weren’t acting like jackasses right before the bear attacked.
I feel sorry for that Cub, and from the looks of it, so did the hunters, right from the beginning. They seemed more upset that they had to shoot than with the fact that they could have gotten eaten.
They had previously scouted their territory before shooting, and didn’t know the sow was there. I read in news clipping that the outfitter makes sure that there are no sows with cubs nearby when they take a shot. However, this sow was hidden, and he just shot.
And they absolutely didn’t want to shoot her. That’s one less cub that can mature into either a breeding sow or boar, and they have also removed a breeding animal from the population. These animals don’t produce many offspring, so every breeding animal in the population is important. That said, there are enough of them to hunt them.
You should read the PETAesque comments on that video.
Some say “You can’t eat a bear!” Well, I have, and it’s good!
I would not have lost any sleep if these idiots had gotten killed. When people do stupid crap, they have it coming. This applies to these jokers, to people who jump into zoo enclosures or to Aussie dudes who step on stingrays.
I disagree that they were doing “stupid crap”. They took all reasonable precautions, and sometimes shit happens.
Promethean needs to understand that hunters do MORE – vastly more – to support wildlife conservancy and more to preserve fragile habitats than ALL of the animal rights organizations put together!
I think Promethean does hunt or did in the past, because he’d told me that he did run a working Brittany.
The dumb thing these hunters did is they didn’t fully check the area in which they were shooting for sows with cubs. Sows with cubs will attack if they hear guns going off.
What an experience to capture on video!