Maine Bear Ballot Measure: Questions & Answers | The Humane Society of the United States

	Maine Bear Ballot Measure: Questions & Answers

What does the Maine ballot measure do?
It bans three inhumane bear hunting methods: baiting, hounding, and trapping.
What if an individual animal causes a nuisance or threatens public safety?
The initiative provides exceptions that would allow the use of bait, dogs, or traps in certain cases, primarily to protect public safety and to conduct wildlife research. In short, if there is a compelling social or biological need to capture or kill a bear, these methods can be used.
How did the measure qualify for the ballot?
Thousands of Maine citizens volunteered their time and collected a statewide record of 103,000 signatures of registered voters to qualify the measure.
How many bears do hunters kill in Maine each season?
There are about 3,500 bears killed each year, with nearly 3,000 of them killed over bait. Approximately 300–400 are killed with the aid of dogs, and 100–200 are killed with traps. Among the bears killed in 2002, hunters shot 1,599 females and 268 cubs born that year.
Who hunts bears in Maine?
About 80% of the bears shot in Maine are killed by trophy hunters from other states. Hunting guides and outfitters set up thousands of bait sites a year and charge out-of-state hunters a fee to shoot feeding bears. Annually, these hunters kill about 3,000 bears that are conditioned at bait sites in Maine.
What is bear baiting?
Baiting involves setting out food to attract bears within shooting range. It is a favored technique for guides and outfitters, who often guarantee their paying clients an opportunity to shoot a trophy bear.
What does a bait site consist of?
Bait sites consist of jelly doughnuts and other pastries, rotting fruits and vegetables, and grease and honey. The bait is either placed in a barrel, a five-gallon plastic bucket, or dumped on the forest floor. Sometimes hunting guides will burn honey to attract bears.
What's the primary objection to baiting?
It is unfair and unsportsmanlike to lure an animal with garbage and shoot the bear while he or she is feeding. The baiting of other big game, such as deer and moose, is banned for ethical reasons. So is the baiting of migratory waterfowl. Baiting is also wrong for bears.
Are bears particularly susceptible to baiting?
Yes. In the fall, bears feed for up to 15 hours a day—a feeding phase known as hyperphagia—in order to build fat reserves for a long period of dormancy. Baiting exploits their need to feed almost constantly by providing a ready source of food. In Maine, bait piles are set out a month before the actual hunting season starts.
So, is baiting a tradition in Maine?
No. Guides and outfitters took up baiting in earnest about 25 years ago to attract out-of-state hunters. By baiting bears, the guide could all but guarantee the out-of-state hunter a trophy bear. Prior to that, baiting was uncommon, and the bear population did fine in the absence of a large baiting program.
What does hound hunting of bears entail?
In hound hunting a pack of hounds is fitted with radio transmitters on their collars and set loose at a bait site. The dogs pick up the scent of bears that have recently visited the bait site and chase them, with the hunter following the dogs and tracking the chase with a handheld directional antenna. Typically, the chase ends when the bear climbs a tree to escape the dogs. The hunter then follows the signal to the base of the tree, and then shoots the bear out of the tree. Such high-tech hunting is highly inhumane and unsportsmanlike. Shooting an animal trapped in a tree is the moral and sporting equivalent of shooting a bear in a cage at a zoo.
Do bears and dogs ever get into fights?
The scientific literature reveals that bears do sometimes turn and fight the dogs, resulting in serious injury or death for both dogs and bears. A bear hunting guide in Maine posted the following in 2004: "I have also seen a cornered bear go thru [sic] a pack of hounds like a hot knife thru [sic] butter and either kill or mortally wound all of em [sic] in about 10 seconds...."
Aren't baiting and hounding needed for management reasons?
No. Biologists have documented that bears regulate their numbers based on the available food supply and by defending large territories. Maine managed its bears for decades without having much baiting or hounding. Baiting, and to a lesser extent hounding, began in earnest only 25 years ago, when a relatively small number of hunting guides saw that they could profit by selling opportunities to out-of-state hunters to shoot trophy bears.
Don't all other states manage bears by allowing baiting and hounding
No, most states ban baiting—the predominant hunting method in Maine. And a substantial number of states with large populations of bears—Colorado, Montana, New York, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, for instance—ban baiting, hounding, and trapping, and are able to manage their bears just fine. Maine is the only state that still allows bears to be trapped.
What about the argument that it would be impossible to hunt bears in Maine without bait?
Maine hunters are skillful, and should have no problem hunting bears without bait. They won't always succeed, but it will be a sporting hunt. They hunt the same way that sportsmen pursue bears in the many other states that ban baiting and hounding.
Is there any evidence that hunters can make a transition from baiting and hounding to stalking bears?
Yes. Three states—Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—that most recently approved ballot initiatives in the early and mid 1990s nearly identical to the one being considered in Maine provide great case examples. In each of these states, hunters learned to hunt bears without bait or dogs and the annual bear kills in each of these states did not diminish at all.
But isn't Maine's vegetation more dense?
Anyone who has been in the forests of western Oregon and Washington knows that these forests are as dense with vegetation as any in the United States—more dense that the forests of Maine. And other northeastern forest types—including those of Pennsylvania and New York—are no impediment to hunters. Thousands of mature, open-forested beech tree ridges exist in Maine and they are the primary habitat used by bears in the fall.
Why did license sales increase in these states after baiting and hounding were banned?
Baiters and hounders were so efficient that they were taking most of the bears, which made it hard for rank-and-file sportsmen to hunt bears. Once these unfair hunting methods were outlawed, the playing field was leveled and thousands of other hunters took up bear hunting.
Aren't baiters and hounders particularly dominant in Maine?
Yes. In fact, they pay certain private landowners to secure exclusive hunting rights for their commercial hunting activities. One baiter has essentially locked Maine recreational hunters out of 500,000 acres of land. Another bear guide boasts of having exclusive hunting and baiting privileges on 250 square miles of land.
So, baiters are closing up hunting lands to Maine bear hunters who won't pay them a fee?
That's right, and it amounts to millions of acres closed to Maine sportsmen. By catering to out-of-state hunters, commercial guides and outfitters are locking out Maine hunters from prime bear hunting areas throughout the state.
Doesn't the state discourage people from feeding bears?
Absolutely. The state even has a brochure that tells people to never feed bears. Feeding bears habituates them to human food sources, and causes them to raid garbage cans, cabins, and campgrounds. "Don't Feed the Bears" is an admonition that forest users throughout Maine and the rest of the United States commonly hear from wildlife managers.
Isn't it a contradiction to tell people that it's wrong to feed bears, and then to allow baiting?
Yes. The state is trying to say it's okay for guides and outfitters catering to trophy hunters to set out hundreds of thousands of pounds of food for bears, but it's wrong for every other citizen in Maine to leave a single doughnut out for bears. It just doesn't make sense.
But aren't most bears that feed at bait stations shot by hunters, thereby eliminating the bears that have been taught bad habits?
Hunters shoot only some of the bears that visit the bait sites. Bait sites are stocked with food 30 days before the hunting season begins, and continue to be replenished with food during the hunting season. Bears who visit the sites and are not shot are more likely to become nuisance bears, since they are gorging on human-scented food and becoming habituated to human food sources.
Isn't the concern about bear feeding a prime reason why most states and some federal land management agencies ban baiting?
Other states ban baiting because of concerns about fairness, sportsmanship, and consistency in big game hunting rules. But they're also concerned about the effect of unregulated feeding on bear behavior. Once habituated to human foods, bears lose their wariness of people and are more likely to raid campgrounds, cars, and cabins,.where they may come into conflict with people. This threatens the bears, but it also threatens public safety.
Is there an argument that baiting actually inflates the size of the Maine bear population?
Yes, the thousands of bait piles set out in Maine amount to a massive supplemental feeding program for bears. There is no question that there are hundreds of thousands of pounds of bait set out for bears each fall. This supplemental feeding fattens up the bears and probably increases their rate of reproduction and cub survival. More food translates into more cubs, so bear baiting is ultimately self-defeating when it comes to population control.
So, if we didn't have widespread baiting, then we probably would not have as many bears in the state?
Even the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (DIF&W) concedes that the size of the bear population is influenced by available food resources. Recently, the Department predicted a decline in the bear population because of beech bark disease infestation in the state. So, it is a well-established principle that more food for bears translates into more reproduction and an inflated population. Baiting will invariably increase Maine's population of bears.
Doesn't baiting guarantee a humane kill?
Any responsible hunter, no matter the method of hunting he chooses, should hold fire until he has a clean shot at a bear and can kill the bear.
Don't trappers also use bait in Maine?
Yes. They set traps near bait sites. Bears then step into snare or leghold traps, languishing and suffering in the vise grip of the traps. There is nothing humane about a bear struggling in a baited trap, and the law allows trappers to wait as long as 24 hours before they are required to check the traps.
Is trapping bears for sport legal in Maine?
Yes. In fact, it's the only state in the nation that allows trapping of bears—showing how extreme Maine's bear hunting policies are. Because trapping bears is often done in tandem with baiting, the practice is even more inhumane and unsporting. Maine's DIF&W proposed banning the steel-jawed bear trap 25 years ago, but the powerful trapper's lobby was able to squash the proposal.

For more information, contact:
Maine Citizens for Fair Bear Hunting
190 U.S. Route One
Falmouth, Maine 04105
207-781-5155
www.fairbearhunting.org