Games will be used to spotlight 300 dead bears
Chance to halt damnation closing rapidly, ecologists say
By Ethan Baron, The Province, June 17, 2009
Here in the allegedly Best Place on Earth, we're on our way to international disgrace, come the Olympics.
If you thought head-bashed baby seals made Canada look bad, just wait till you see what sport-killed grizzly bears do to B.C.
Trophy hunters kill some 300 of the threatened animals in B.C. every year, keeping the parts they can show off in their homes, leaving the carcasses to rot.
If the province doesn't ban the hunt, international and local conservation and animal-welfare groups will expose the province's bloody little secret when the world arrives for the Winter Games.
"We will bring a lot of attention on this issue using the Olympics as a platform," says Joanne Chang, a spokeswoman for Humane Society International, which has 10 million members around the world and spearheaded the campaign that led the European Union to vote for a ban on Canadian seal products.
The Liberal government has a chance to avoid soiling B.C.'s reputation, if it ends grizzly hunting before the Games, says Ian McAllister, conservation director of the environmental group Pacific Wild.
"That window of opportunity is closing quickly," McAllister says.
If B.C. fails to act, hordes of foreign visitors will learn that the Gordon Campbell government, in one of its first orders of business, overturned a moratorium on grizzly hunting in 2001. Olympic tourists will no doubt be quite surprised to discover the B.C. government allows trophy hunting in nearly 80 per cent of parks and protected areas.
Even in the Great Bear Rainforest, trumpeted by Premier Campbell in 2006 as an area of "vast richness," and "protected" by his government this year, grizzlies can be legally hunted in many areas.
A government release defending the grizzly hunt says bear hunting adds $120 million a year to the B.C. economy. Their source? The province's hunting-guides association.
In contrast, the Centre for Integral Economics in June 2003 reported B.C. grizzly hunting brought in $3 million a year, while tourism related to viewing grizzlies netted $6 million. A single bear-viewing lodge in Knight Inlet brought more income than the whole hunt.
"A live bear is worth far more than a dead bear," says McAllister, who hunts deer every year for meat but is appalled when he comes across hunter-skinned grizzly carcasses.
"It's horrible," he says. "You can just see every tendon and muscle." A 2008 poll by McAllister Research (no relation to Ian) found that 79 per cent of British Columbians opposed trophy hunting of grizz- lies.
While the government claims 16,000 grizzlies live in B.C., they base that number on data from the two most grizzly-rich areas of B.C., and, absurdly, extrapolate those numbers across the province.
No reliable population estimates exist.
Alberta suspended its grizzly hunt in 2006.
The people of B.C. want this economically foolish and morally deplorable hunt stopped. If the government doesn't scrap it by Games time, though, we're all going to be painted with the same bloody brush.
Just call us Brutal British Columbia.
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