The Sierra Club filed a letter opposing a California Department of Fish and Game proposal to expand the use of dog packs in bear hunting.

The proposal, outlined in a draft environmental impact report released by the DFG in January, proposed increasing the amount of land on which hunters can use dogs and again allowing the use of GPS collars and “tip switches,” which tell hunters when their dogs are looking up at a treed animal.

The Fish and Game Commission prohibited GPS collars and “tip switches” in 1994, saying that it was unethical to provide unfair advantage over the hunted bears.

Bear hunting with dog packs is already allowed in Tuolumne and Calaveras counties.

According to Richard J. Garcia, the chair of the Black Bear Task Force, the Sierra Club doesn’t oppose bear hunting, just the use of dogs to hunt bears and the use of technology to make it easier.

“If you’re going to kill our bears, do it humanely,” Garcia said. “We’re not calling for a halt of bear hunting.”

The organization hired environmental law firm Jan Chatten-Brown and Doug Carlston to help it submit arguments against the draft environmental impact report.

The Sierra Club contends that forcing dogs and bears into violent interactions violates animal cruelty laws.

“If you had a dog and a bear, you couldn’t make them fight,” he said.

According to the Humane Society of America, only 17 states allow the use of hounds in bear hunting. That’s because of the danger to not just the bear, but the hound as well, Garcia said.

“A dog on its own doesn’t stand a chance,” Garcia said. “But when you release a pack, the bear will run. The pack trees the bear and then the hunter shoots the bear out of the tree.”

The Humane Society posted a gruesome video of “bear hounding,” which shows dogs chasing a bear.

The use of GPS locators makes it so that the hunter doesn’t even need to know where his dogs are going, Garcia said.

The draft report also proposes opening up more territory for bear hunting, including pieces of Modoc, Lassen and San Luis Obispo counties, and increasing the “harvest” from 1,700 bears to 2,500 statewide.

It would also lengthen the hunting season and allow the issuance of more bear-hunting tags.

The area identified in Modoc and Lassen counties is in the core of the bear habitat in the Warner Mountains, which is made up of a mix of private and public land. Without clear designations, hounds run amok on private property, according to the Humane Society.

According to the report, increasing the land that hunters can hunt bears on will lessen the pressure on bear populations that are already in hunting areas.

The black bear lives throughout the United States and in most of the West. According to the DFG, the population of black bears doubled between 1982 and 2006 from 10,000 to 15,000 bears in 1982 to 25,000 to 30,000 bears in 2006.

Forty percent of the state’s black bears live in the Sierra Nevada.

Further Reading on this topic:

Bear hunting proposal should be shot down, Ventura County Star, March 25th 2010