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All Politics Articles
A 23-year-old Montana man who was mauled after he smoked marijuana and entered a pen to feed a grizzly bear at Great Bear Adventures park where he worked was awarded workers' compensation benefits, reports the Flathead Beacon.
Brock Hopkins sustained serious injuries, including a dislocated kneecap and $70,000 in medical expenses when he was attacked by the bear in 2007. He is lucky to be alive.
EDMONTON - The Alberta government has declared the province's grizzly bears to be a threatened species.
The immediate effect of the designation is that the province's suspension of its controversial licensed grizzly hunt will continue for now.
Sustainable Resource Development Minister Mel Knight made the announcement Thursday.
FWC Press Release:
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) is soliciting public input on a draft bear management plan. This plan sets up the framework for the FWC to make effective bear management decisions in conjunction with stakeholders and the public who live in bear country. The goal of the plan is to maintain sustainable bear populations in suitable habitats throughout Florida for the benefit of the species and the public.
FAIRBANKS--A backpacker shot and killed a grizzly bear Friday night in Denali National Park and Preserve, the first such incident within the park's original borders in decades and also the first since a February change in federal laws allowed licensed visitors to carry loaded guns in national parks, a parks spokeswoman said Sunday afternoon.
Parks biologists and rangers are investigating the case, trying to figure out whether the backpacker had justification for shooting the bear, said Kris Fister, a park spokeswoman. The parks service was withholding the hiker's name as of Sunday.
EDMONTON—If Alberta keeps building roads into remote regions where its few remaining grizzly bears live, the bruins will be on a path to oblivion, conservationists warn in a report released Friday.
“It’s pretty much as simple as that. If we can do a better job of managing access in grizzly bear habitat, then we can manage grizzly bears in Alberta,” Nigel Douglas, conservation specialist with the Alberta Wilderness Association, said in an interview.
Ursus maritimus—otherwise known as the polar bear—has had one bear of a month. First, a new study predicted a rapid decline in the Canadian polar bear population. As soon as next year. And by as much as 30 percent.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, a hunter shot and killed a hybrid grizzly-polar bear—dubbed the "grolar bear"—an emerging type of bear mutt that scientists say is proof that climate change-induced Arctic ice melting is forcing the furry white giants to interbreed.
Keith Hammer and his Swan View Coalition have filed a 60-day notice of intent to file a lawsuit if a planned endurance run in the Swan Mountains is not moved to another location.
Hammer, the coalition's chairman, says the Swan Crest 100-Mile Run should not be held on "sensitive roadless areas, proposed wilderness areas and threatened grizzly bear habitat."
A group of Republican lawmakers says policies aimed at protecting the grizzly bear and other cross-boundary species along the U.S.-Canada border are putting wildlife conservation ahead of national security on America's northern frontier.
In a statement released this week warning that "the national security threat from the North is real," the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives committee on natural resources alleged that agents with the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Border Patrol "are frequently unable to effectively monitor this land due to environmental regulations."
The meaning of a recent court case in Wyoming is clear: you can't kill a grizzly just because you're frightened. 41-year-old Stephen Westmoreland shot a female grizzly last fall in Grand Teton National Park that showed no sign of aggression. He'd been gutting a deer and was "covered in animal blood," according to an OregonLive story, when he came across the bear feeding on a gut pile he'd seen earlier in the day. He shot it from 40 yards, afraid the griz might decide to attack him.
The bear that bit a visitor to Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been put to death, despite a major effort to save it and amid sharp criticism of the park for its plan to destroy the animal. The park announced Thursday afternoon that the bear was euthanized on Wednesday "in accordance with widely accepted wildlife and visitor use management policies and practices." The 60-pound female bear, which was underweight but described as being older than the age of 2, bit a park visitor May 12 on the Laurel Falls Trail.
There's a need for officials to come up with a better definition of a bear 'attack.' Calling a single bite to a foot from a 60-pound yearling an attack, when the bite didn't require medical attention, seems a stretch. Lack of knowledge and fear of lawsuits drive decisions to 'play it safe' and kill bears that raise questions. Killing a bear is the easy way out.
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." Dr. Seuss
Remember Dr. Seuss's The Lorax? In this 1971 classic, published the very year the Alberta Tories came to power for the first time, the well-meaning (if short-sighted) Onceler stumbles upon a landscape dominated by groves of beautiful Truffala trees. Delighted at his discovery, he promptly begins to turn this imaginary ecosystem into a working landscape in which Truffalas are chopped down and turned into thneeds (something that all people need) "just as fast you please."
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — The trial for a hunter who shot a grizzly bear in Teton County is under way.
Forty-one-year-old Stephen Westmoreland has pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of illegally taking a grizzly bear last year. The bear was one of three cubs that gained fame in Grand Teton National Park from 2006 to 2008 as their mother raised them near the roadside.
With the Alberta government stalled on making a decision about the fate of our dwindling grizzly bear population, our province is in the hot seat. A timely new book by conservationist Jeff Gailus turns the heat up a little higher.
Jeff Gailus found out what a mama bear looks like up close and personal (and we're not talking A&W here) when he went for a solo run one morning in the wilds of northern B.C. "As I stood alone on that hillside, an irate sow storming toward me with the quick, bowlegged gait of a bulldog accosting a stranger who has happened into its yard, my thoughts revert," he writes in The Grizzly Manifesto: In Defence of the Great Bear. "I'm going to lose that bottle of scotch." The scotch in question had been half-jokingly bequeathed to a friend in the event Gailus didn't return from an adventure he now admits he shouldn't have undertaken alone, sans bear spray or noisemaker, in grizzly country.
The Progressive Conservative government of Alberta appears to be engaged in the revival of the Grizzly Bear, a dance craze of the early 1900s, and cousin to the Turkey Trot.
According to accounts of the Grizzly Bear, the dancers would cry out "It's a bear!" and then take a heavy, ungainly step to one side, with the upper body curving one way to the other, arms help up, all in an ungraceful lurching movement. The dance, which was considered vulgar in its time, is an apt metaphor for the Alberta government's handling of the conservation of grizzlies.
With bear season now upon us the time to start thinking about bear-proofing your property is now. Earlier this week there were reports of a blonde grizzly bear hanging around the Victoria and Davis Street area. On Tuesday, however, the local conservation officer, Peter Businc, was able to get out and spot the bear and confirm that it was a “scruffy” light brown colored black bear and not a grizzly bear as first thought by people who had spotted it.
In other bear-related news, the Rossland Bear Aware program has been brought back from the brink it found itself staring over earlier this year in large part due to the support of the Columbia Basin Trust. Facing uncertain funding year after year, the program looked as though it would drop down to a voluntary service rather than fully-funded program.
Whistler escaped Bear Season 2009 without a bruin having been shot by conservation officers, so now is an opportune time, if budgets have to be cut, to slash the position of Bear Response Officer, right? Well, maybe.
In the two years leading up to the summer of 2009, conservation and RCMP officers shot a total of 21 black bears deemed to have become a hazard to public safety — i.e. they had lost their fear of humans to the point where they were entering homes, businesses and vehicles in search of food. The carnage was, of course, not the bears’ fault — lack of proper management of bear attractants, especially garbage, by humans was largely to blame for attracting segments of Whistler’s much-beloved bear population into town in search of a free meal.
A public hearing on the Department of Environmental Protection's proposed black bear management policy, a scientifically designed, common sense mix of hunting, education, research and non-lethal bear management tools, is set for tomorrow night at the State Museum in Trenton.'
Commissioner Bob Martin in March approved the New Jersey Fish and Game Council's 2010 Comprehensive Black Bear Management Policy, which will be under consideration at the public hearing, which starts at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, May 11. If the proposed policy is approved, it would allow the first bear hunt in the state since 2005.
EDMONTON — Members of an advisory group say Alberta is putting politics before science by delaying a decision on protecting the province’s dwindling number of grizzly bears.
In March, the government-appointed Endangered Species Conservation Committee told the province it should list the bears as a “threatened” species based on research that says there are fewer than 700 grizzlies left in Alberta.
WEIHAI, China -- If you believe wild animals don't belong in cages, then you would be well-advised never to visit a Chinese bear farm: the putrid stink of musk, feces and urine hits you long before the threshold is reached, but this is scant preparation for what lies behind the doors of a crumbling building in the industrial outskirts of Weihai, a city on China's far eastern coast.
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