This bear does some amazing acrobatics in the trees. (Yes, they shoot him in the end. In West Virginia, bears are eaten.)
When I was a kid, there were 500 bears in the whole state. Most of them were in the High Alleghenies or in southern West Virginia.
There now are an estimated 10,000 black bears, and they are found in every county.
Hunting hasn’t hurt their numbers in the least, and we have almost no conflict between humans and bears.
They have a healthy fear of people.
They get that fear because they are hunted, and the hounds that run the bears are run on bears fairly often. There is a bear hound training season in which the dogs learn to tree the bears, but the bears are left to go on their own.
That’s when bears learn their health fear of dogs and humans.
They are hazed in the same way British Columbia’s wildlife department uses Karelian bear dogs to haze problem bears.
It’s just with West Virginia, the hazing is outsourced. And the hazers pay to do it.
Could a grizzly be hunted with hounds?
For one thing, I don’t think they like to do it with dogs, because grizzly bears will attack instead of run away when they feel threatened. And that usually takes out more than a few dogs.
They used to. Montague Stevens ran a pack of many different kinds of dogs on grizzly bears in northern New Mexico:
http://www.stpns.net/view_article.html?articleId=108510810876232011173
It’s possible, but it’s not done. From what I understand, it’s impractical to hunt Grizzly with hounds because they are protected throughout most of their range; and if hunting Grizzlies is allowed, it tend to be on a limited basis. So, what’s the point of owning dogs that won’t have enough seasonal experience on a species and where chances are akin to running a lottery?
They do hunt brown-bears in Russia and Nordic countries with hounds and spitzes though.
Respondents to this question at http://biggamehoundsmen.com/forum/grizzly-hunting-t10150.html had mixed answers.
how did the “W Va abear population get down to 500?
Market hunting.
Also killing them indiscriminately because they do kill sheep and hogs.
Regulated sport hunting has had the opposite effect.
I think that it was probably the indiscriminate “vermin hunting” of bears that had the biggest impact on their numbers. For several centuries they were pretty much shot on sight & their populations became fragmented and critically low.
Bears are becoming very numerous here in eastern Kentucky, too, to the point that they are getting to be a problem. “Problem” bears are trapped, tranked, & relocated, usually to reclaimed strip mine sites in another county.We have a hunting season for bears, but hunting with dogs is still prohibited. Hunters are allowed about a week in December during which they can use dogs to chase bears in order to train the dogs, so that they can be used to hunt bears in other states. How stupid is that?
I loved this concept of outsourcing. I would love to bid for services once I have trained hounds ;-)
It is nice to know that your black bear population has been increasing of late, notwithstanding the sheer nastiness of this murder to music video.