Bear Hunting Dogs on the Loose

Early Saturday morning I was enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee and a good book while lounging on the living room couch. The slider door was open and I had half an ear tuned to birdsong.

First I heard the growling of young bears in the distance, in the far reaches of our back property or our next door neighbor's property and beyond. It sounded a bit like the cubs were carousing and wrestling each other. Next came the furious barking of dogs, lots of dogs raising a racket. By this time, I was out the slider and on the deck, listening and alarmed. All of this was followed by the deep growls and bellows of a mature bear, growling over and over while the dogs continued to bark. By this time, I'd pulled Ken out of bed and we were both standing on the deck.



Any good scent hound, like these foxhounds, can hunt bear
As the barking and growling continued, I imagined the cubs surrounded by dogs, or perhaps the mother bear surrounded. Or perhaps the dogs had managed to get the cubs up a tree, or the mother. After about ten minutes, the sounds stopped.

Later, on my walk with Sophie, I ran into a neighbor and told him the story. He shook his head. "I'm sorry he's doing that."

"You know whose dogs they were?" I asked.

"Sounds like the fellow training his bear hunting dogs. It's not legal to hunt bears in New York," he said, "but you can train them here. This guy hunts bears in Vermont."

In the course of my travels later in the morning, I found out the name of the local person who this neighbor was referring to. I later had his name confirmed by several other people.

I placed a call to New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation and eventually got to have a good long talk with the game warden who covers our area. As people had told me, July 1st was the first day of the season when hunters are allowed to train dogs to track bears. The warden pointed out, however, that a person has to obtain a special permit to do this. Steve (the warden) said he'd see if any permits were filed for our area.

What a time to have this bear tracking training season, though! The time when mother bears and their cubs are at their most vulnerable. Just think of the stress this mother bear and cubs went through over this incident. It made me angry and sad. If New York does not allow hunting bears with dogs, then it should not allow this "training" to go on.

While writing this entry, the phone rang. It was the game warden, letting me know that the hunter believed to have been involved in this incident does indeed have a permit. The cost of the permit? $100/year.