One bear attacks a human, while civilization attacks the entire WNC bear population

How ironic that a "bear attack" story would make the front page of the Citizen-Times on opening day of bear-hunting season! With the added incitement of constantly reviewing the (few) bear incidents and the declaration of record bear populations, one wonders why the Citizen-Times has declared war on Western North Carolina's most magnificent mammal. Only a few month's earlier, the C-T's Adventure of the Week feature encouraged people to bring their buckets and pick blueberries … near Craggy Gardens. Hundreds of people collected bear food, and then, when a hungry bear attempted to take some picnic food and the area had to be closed, a bear was euthanized and it was front-page news again.

With exploding development, bad press, a food supply taken by people and hunting season, these are hard times for bears. I can only hope that N.C. Wildlife Commissioner Mike Carraway's comments were slanted by the reporter. It disgusts me to think Carraway would willingly participate in this campaign. The truth is that most people have never seen a bear in the wild, not even here in WNC. But we are far more likely to encounter the stray bullets during hunting season as we hike, bike, garden or just step outside to search for our daily newspapers.

Note of caution: Wear blaze orange if you have to go outside. Post "No hunting" signs on your property. Report baiting. And good luck.

— Anna James
Asheville

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2 thoughts on “One bear attacks a human, while civilization attacks the entire WNC bear population

  1. leslie

    ON spot! Taking from nature and then acting like nature is bad because it comes looking for food in insane thinking.

  2. joe jamison

    Totally agreed. I had my no hunting sign up a month ago. In the Black Mountain News, recently, they had an article stating that calls for ‘nuisance’ bears had risin literally by about 100 per year from just a few years ago due to over-development of their habitat. The saddest part was that they can no longer relocate the bears, because there’s no longer a location within reason that they wouldn’t be a ‘nuisance’ to someone else. Terribly sad. Yet if you read the comments from ‘How do we get from kindness to animals to “let’s slaughter them”?’
    by Stewart David? in Vol. 16 / Iss. 13 on 10/21/2009, you will see that as people me be remiss to the position of the bears, they enjoy their meats which are prime components in habitat destruction. The longer I live and more people I speak with, the less hope I have for our species, let alone all the ones we affect.

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