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B.C. grizzly hunter calls new provincial ban wasteful, hurtful to local economies

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For six days, hunter Steve Hamilton stealthily prowled the wilderness of the Williston Lake region, about an eight-hour drive north of Prince George, in search of a grizzly bear.

It was a sunny day in late May — the annual spring bear hunt — when Hamilton finally spotted a big male grizzly at a distance of about 100 metres on a mountainside.

He laid on the ground to steady himself, took careful aim and fired his Browning 338 rifle.

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The bullet punctured the bear’s heart and lungs and it fell immediately — a clean kill that bled mixed feelings.

“It was a wave of emotions,” Hamilton said in an interview Tuesday. “I cannot stress enough that no hunter likes the kill, but we realize in order to put the meat in our freezer, it’s a necessary part of it. 

“The first thing I do when I shoot an animal is I go over to it and thank it for giving its life. You might think it’s weird but that’s what I do. It’s all about respect for the animal and utilizing as much as we can.

“If you eat meat, something dies. We take out the middle man, we do it ourselves … We truly know where our food comes from.”

On Monday, the NDP government made good on a high-profile election promise by announcing a B.C.-wide ban on the unpopular trophy hunting of grizzly bears, while allowing hunting to continue for meat.

Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development Doug Donaldson said that grizzly trophy hunting is “not a socially acceptable practice in 2017” and encouraged wilderness operators to look instead to the economics of bear viewing.

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Effective Nov. 30, 2017 — after the fall hunt — the province pledges to “end grizzly bear trophy hunting throughout the province and stop all hunting of grizzlies in the Great Bear Rainforest,” Donaldson said. 

While the grizzly trophy hunt will end, hunting for meat may continue outside the Great Bear Rainforest.

The province will close “loopholes” by forbidding a meat hunter from possessing the paws, head, and hide of a grizzly to ensure trophy hunts are not conducted under the guise of a meat hunt, Donaldson added.

In response, Hamilton said the decision would lead to wasteful practices and remove money from local businesses, including guide-outfitters and taxidermists. A guided grizzly trophy hunt costs up to $30,000.

“It’s completely politically motivated and is not science based,” said Hamilton, president of the 100-member Spruce City Wildlife Association in Prince George. “It’s against everything we stand for. We should be using as much of our harvest as possible.”

About 170 grizzlies are killed annually in B.C. by resident hunters and 80 by foreign hunters accompanied by commercial guides. The total number of grizzlies killed is expected to drop under the new law, although Hamilton suspects resident meat hunters will continue to hunt grizzlies.
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The province estimates there are 15,000 grizzly bears in B.C. 

Hamilton said he has been hunting for more than 30 years, starting at age eight with his grandfather and uncles, and has hunted deer, moose, elk, and black bears.

He’d applied six times for a limited-entry grizzly hunt over a decade, was drawn twice, but this was his first successful hunt. “It was something that drew me, something I really wanted to do.”

It took Hamilton and his hunting buddy four trips, but they eventually removed a few hundred pounds of meat, plus the pelt, and went back to their pickup truck. When he got home, he had the meat cut and wrapped and the pelt taken to a taxidermist to be made into a rug for his basement for an undisclosed price. 

“I can’t tell you because my wife would kill me. It was pricey.” One Prince George taxidermist said the cost is close to $300 per linear foot for a rug.

He added: “It’s an education piece, you show people we’re not just all about the biggest, baddest, most gory thing you can do. It’s a love for what we do, and filling the freezer, and getting to relive that hunt.” 

The skull was dropped off at a government office as per legal requirement and the bear was aged at 17 years. “I always said that if I was going to take a grizzly bear I would take the most mature one I could and utilize as much of the animal as I could. And that’s what we did. It was completely used, from hide to freezer.”

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He described grizzly meat as “really good” and similar to lean pork, and can be cooked as roasts, hams, sausages, pepperoni or bacon. Cooking the meat well eliminates the danger of trichinosis, a parasitic roundworm infection, Hamilton added.

About three-quarters of rural British Columbians oppose the grizzly bear trophy hunt, according to an Insights West poll conducted in March for an ecotourism group.

The poll found an average of 74 per cent opposed grizzly trophy hunting in five Liberal ridings: Kamloops-North Thompson, Boundary-Similkameen, Fraser Nicola, Cariboo North and Kootenay East. 

A 2015 Insights West poll found that 91 per cent of British Columbians oppose the grizzly trophy hunt.

During the election, the Liberals pledged to end the grizzly trophy hunt in the Great Bear Rainforest, where Coastal First Nations vigorously oppose the blood sport, but not the rest of the province.

The Green party’s position was to require any grizzly hunter to pack the meat home — a law that would effectively stop foreign trophy hunters of grizzlies, but not residents.

In a highly publicized case in 2013, National Hockey League defenceman Clayton Stoner ignored the wishes of local Aboriginals and shot a well-known adult male grizzly in the Kwatna River estuary. In 2016, Stoner was fined $10,000 under the Wildlife Act for hunting without a proper licence and banned from hunting for three years.

NHL player Clayton Stoner holding up a grizzly bear head in this photo taken in May and released to media on September 3, 2013.
NHL player Clayton Stoner holding up a grizzly bear head in this photo taken in May and released to media on September 3, 2013. PROVINCE

lpynn@postmedia.com

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