Title: Washington Bears
Tags: bear bait archery dogs
Blog Entry: Bear hunting in Washington is really tough. The idiots that make the rules have decided not only that you can't hunt with dogs anymore, but you can't even bait bears. Yet they still beg of you not to shoot bears with cubs, and to take your time to be certain you are shooting a mature boar. Are you kidding me? I hunt with archery gear, and if by some miracle I am able to see a bear, since I can't bait them, I am DEFINITLY going to let the air out of the thing. Even if it is a cub. The utter stupidity of the Washington Dept of Fish and Wildlife is amazing. Instead of being able to bait and/or hunt with dogs, they apparently have no issues with the increased maulings. Every week there are sightings of at least a half-dozen bears in back yards, school yards, or parks in the area. Trash gets strewn about our suburbs, and several bicyclists get mauled each year by bears that aren't afraid of humans any more. Rather than being able to wait for an ethical shot at a bear feeding on a bait, at a known distance, or give a hunter the opportunity to judge the bear, it seems the WDFW would rather an archer sling an arrow at a passing bear, at whatever angle or distance it happens by chance to be at. The really sad aprt of teh story is that we have some truly huge black bears here. I have trail camera pics of record-book bears. But to come across them accidentally has been very frustrating. I wish the people submitting stories to the local news would call me, instead of the television stations. I would be happy to solve their bear problem for them. But I guess most people would rather talk about a problem than to actually DO something about it. If anyone has any input on how a person goes about changing game laws, and talking sense to these people, please let me know.
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