cbfraser wrote:The majority of British Columbians want to end all forms of grizzly bear hunting, according to a new poll.
According to an Insights West poll – commissioned by Lush Cosmetics and the Commercial Bear Viewing Association – 74 per cent of people are in favour of the B.C. government banning all hunting of grizzly bears in the province.
Nineteen per cent were opposed.
The new NDP government announced in August it would outlaw the killing of the bears for trophies starting spring 2018.
And while 88 per cent of people polled support the move, Insights West vice president Mario Canseco said there’s clearly an appetite among the public for government to go even further.
“I wasn’t expecting as high a level of support to banning all kinds of grizzly bear hunting as what we saw,” the pollster told Metro. “I thought maybe this had more to do with the trophy aspect but now I’m starting to realize, looking at the numbers, it’s ultimately about the bears. There are a lot of people asking why we’re hunting grizzly bears. They’re looking at [banning] the trophy hunt as the first step to an eventual ban on all grizzly hunting.”
Even among the hunters that were polled, Insights West found 71 per cent support for the government’s ban on trophy hunting, and 58 per cent in favour of banning the hunting of the animal altogether.
I wasn't really hoping to make a thread about the grizzly controversy but I guess I opened myself up for this when I responded to albravo.
What you've quoted here is, in my opinion, the very essence of lobbying. Two groups who are very much on the anti-hunting side of the issue pay an organization for a poll that says British Columbians agree with them, then publish it as fact. I could produce this same result for you by heading straight into the urban centers (where most people have never even seen a grizzly) and asking some leading questions. As for the hunters being against the grizzly hunt, how large was the sample size of supposed hunters? What level of hunting experience? Are we talking someone in a thoroughly urban environment who went hunting with a family member once as a child? I have serious doubts that this poll was a true cross section of BC and even if it was one of the problems is the weighting of population toward urban people who don't live with wildlife and have no stake in this declaring what's right and wrong for people who do deal with bears regularly. There were many polls of varying value done in the years leading up to this and I can't recall ever seeing a result that resembled this. I submit that I could get the opposite result by heading up into an area like Burns Lake and polling there.
I personally don't mind bringing out the meat, I would have anyway, I'd like to be able to keep the hide as well though. My biggest problem with this though is that we've given a toe hold to the anti-hunting lobby and we've allowed emotion and the manipulation of it to win the day. With an estimated population of some 15,000 grizzlies in the province and an annual harvest of between 250 and 300 bears it can't be said that hunting was doing any damage to bear numbers. Conflicts between bear tourism and hunting have been extremely rare. During these debates when the antis were losing the argument on science they argued that we needed to set science and facts aside and decide with emotion. What you have is a group of people who just can't stand the idea that somewhere, somebody might be hunting a grizzly bear even though it has no bearing on their life or activities. Yes it's rough for that bear that's being hunted, about the same as it's rough for that cow whose steaks you ate last night. All this to say that I'm always against busy bodies trying to restrict someone else's fun just because they don't like it. This isn't isolated to hunting either, you need only look as far as back country aviation to see the same thing, we just about lost access to all BC Parks in the 90's, also during an NDP government. I say never give an inch to these kind of people because it won't stop here. They're already calling for an end to the spring black bear hunt.
