bear hunting

[Guest guest]

Size really does matter to trophy hunters, which leaves the grizzly in a

tough spot.

 

Geoff Inverarity

 

When a dog bites a man, the saying goes, there's no story. When a man

bites a dog, it's news; it's not the natural order. This is why,

presumably, it's news when, as The Globe and Mail put it recently, " Bear

Injures Tourists, " and why there's no story, when, each year, thousands

of bears are slaughtered and skinned by tourists.

 

On the whole, we kill the ugly animals first. The more a species

resembles us -- physically, as in the case of apes or even bears, which

stand upright at times, using their paws like hands; or socially, when

we become aware of animals whose social structures resemble ours -- the

more we're inclined to offer them protection. When we see them caring

for their young; displaying intelligence or behaviour that appears

altruistic; when we discover that their brains are bigger than ours; or,

even less defensibly, when they just look so darn cute and cuddly, we

privilege them on that continuum of cruelty and exploitation that

constitutes our relationship with other species. After all, it's the

giant panda, not the warthog that's the symbol of the World Wildlife

Federation.

 

Bears ought to have it made. After all, they're human-like in their

physical appearance and they're beautiful animals. Unfortunately,

they're also at the centre of a world trade estimated in the billions of

dollars.

 

Bear heads and hides are prized by trophy hunters; bear paws, when

ingested, are held to be sources of " mystical strength " by Asian

cultures; some people believe that the crystallized bile extracted from

the gall bladder of a bear is a " blood cleanser. "

 

The NDP's moratorium on the grizzly hunt in B.C. may last only as long

as the NDP government itself, but at least it might save the lives of

the 250 grizzlies killed each year by trophy hunters. Black bears,

because their population appears to be thriving, have no such protection

here. The trophy hunting of these is still legal because, as Ray

Halladay, former director of the B.C. wildlife branch of the ministry of

the environment has put it: " Killing bears for trophies is something

that society has deemed acceptable, and so it goes on. " And if there is

no compelling ecological argument for banning trophy hunting per se, it

will go on. And on. And maybe it'll keep going on so long as upwards of

$35 million a year is pumped into the B.C. economy by trophy hunters. At

the same time, however, our society doesn't condone the killing of bears

for body parts. But it happens: Bears are killed for the paws, which are

worth $200 each on the black market, or for the gall bladders, worth

$1,000 each and, when crystallized, reputedly worth 20 times the street

value of cocaine.

 

Yet the antlers or the salmon on the wall or the bearskin rug on the

floor are there for only one reason: They signify the strength of the

man who took the lives of these creatures, and their size symbolizes the

hunter's control over the world, the order he's brought to the chaos of

wilderness. The savage beast is tamed; the outside is made domestic.

Size really matters to these trophy hunters -- they just can't seem to

get enough of it. Why else would they want to stand around with their

buddies measuring the length of each other's fish?

 

Why, as a society, do we condone trophy hunting and yet, in the form of

laws designed to protect bears from one particular form of exploitation,

express moral outrage at the practice of killing bears in order to

harvest body parts in order to gain a so-called " mystical strength " ? In

short, aren't all those socially sanctioned trophies on the walls up

there for the same reason that the paws are in the soup -- to make the

people who put them there feel bigger, stronger, more powerful, more

dangerous?

 

Perhaps there's no real difference between, on the one hand, a culture

that believes that consuming symbolic parts of an animal will pass its

physical and spiritual " power " to the human who devours them and, on the

other, the limp males who spread the heads and hides in front of the log

fire up at the cabin. Isn't it all about acquiring power, the ability to

manipulate life?

 

If there's anything to the argument that says we tend to reserve the

greater part of our sympathies for those animals that most resemble us,

then the appeal of shooting a bear becomes more sinister still. Could it

be that people shoot bears because it's the closest thing to shooting a

human?

 

On the other hand, if there's any truth to the belief that killing a

bear imparts its unique, non-human, essential power to you, then there's

a certain degree of satisfaction in thinking about that very special

breed of hunters, the bottom feeders who kill bears in the spring. These

are the hunters who, in boats, wait for the bears to come out of

hibernation, emaciated, parasite-riddled, disoriented. As the

half-starved animals stumble through the unfamiliar light on to river

banks and shorelines, looking for the berries that will purge them of

their worms, they're slaughtered by hunters. It's only right and fitting

that all that emaciated disorientation should be passed on to the

cowards who shoot them. When they go back to their wives and girlfriends

and the lights go down, and it's just the two of them against the

darkness, then these guys can show the girls what a real man's made of.

 

There are guide-outfitters operating out of the U.S. who are licensed to

lead hunts in B.C. and guarantee a 100-per-cent kill rate. No tourists

who take part in these, or in fact any contemporary guided hunts, get

killed while hunting bears. But then this isn't exactly Daniel Boone

territory. Bear hunters with outfitters like these stay at motels, eat

in restaurants and pay GST on the $3,000 and more they put up front for

the privilege of a guaranteed kill. Last year, in B.C., the over-all

score, not counting the 60 grizzlies and 690 black bears killed for

safety or nuisance reasons, was Humans: 4,000; Bears: 0. All right! No

contest! We're Number 1! There's nothing like a real, spine-tingling

wilderness experience! And this is nothing like one.

 

There's no honour in any of this. But if there's any part of the issue

that turns on the economy, then I have a proposal to make, a modest one,

in order to find an alternative source of revenue for the province. If

you feel desperate enough to eat illegal animal parts because they

signify " power, " then it wouldn't be surprising if you couldn't get it

up. So you can't lose that edge of desperation that is driving you to

gobble bears' paws or hang the heads of dead animals on your walls? If

this is all the problem is, if it just comes down to a simple sense of

anxiety and powerlessness, and if therapy has failed, then instead of

stuffing animals, consider prosthetics. I suggest that the B.C.

Government, with some federal funding, establish a series of clinics in

the bush, where, for a reasonable fee -- say $3,000 plus GST -- a

tourist could trek in and, for that true wilderness experience, undergo

a penile implant without the benefit of anesthetics or antibiotics.

 

And maybe one day society will no longer " deem it acceptable " to kill

bears for trophies, in the same way that society does not " deem it

acceptable " to kill bears for the purposes of trafficking in body parts.

And then perhaps the day will come when " Tourists Injure Bear " is news

enough to make the headlines.

 

 

Geoff Inverarity is a Vancouver writer of poetry, prose and screenplays.