For the past 15 years, Raincoast has been at the forefront of the campaign to end British Columbia’s grizzly hunt. Scientists from Raincoast, University of Victoria, and Simon Fraser University, have just released a new scientific study that Grizzly bear trophy hunt is not founded in science. In addition Nine coastal First Nations: The Wuikinuxv, Heiltsuk, Kitasoo/Xai'xais, Nuxalk, Gitga'at, Metlakatla, Old Massett, Skidegate, and the Council of the Haida Nation have declared bans on bear hunting in their traditional territories The First Nations' ban is not recognized by the Government despite the fact that 87% of British Columbians say it's time to protect our coastal bears, now and forever.
On the ground, Jessie Housty, tribal councillor of the Heiltsuk First Nation, questions the BC government claim that sound science is used to manage the hunting of grizzlies on the Central BC Coast, an area where the provincially sanctioned trophy hunt is at odds with tribal law, which prohibits it. She emphasizes that government biologists conduct no on-the-ground inventory of bears in that area. “How could the government possibly have a solid understanding of these bears they condemn to the hunt without setting foot in our Territory?”
A recent study from Stanford University found that bear viewing contributes 10 times as much revenue and employment as hunting. As Chris Genovali, Executive Director at Raincoast says, “Given widespread public disapproval for this ethically and culturally unacceptable trophy hunt, current Provincial management of grizzlies seems to be driven more by bad political science than good biological science.”
So why do humans do it? Not just in B.C., but on every continent, everywhere a gluttonous rich asshole can go to to murder innocent beings they do. Often the murdered are first captured then turned 'loose' in a fenced area so the 'hunters' can shoot them from safety and with no worry of escape. Humans are exceptional, no other species kills for pleasure.
The only temporary solution to stopping the trophy hunt appears to be literally buying out hunting licenses, Raincoast and its supporters began purchasing hunting rights in 2005. This initiative has saved dozens of grizzlies, black bears and wolves who would have been killed in the commercial trophy hunt. Raincoast and its supporters have acquired the commercial trophy hunting rights in over 28,000 square kilometres of BC’s Great Bear Rainforest. It's significant and Rainforest deserves our support.
The real problem is that humans are capable of this in the first place. Humans seem capable of convincing themselves they are separate from the tree of life that sustains us all equally. Capable of the self-serving belief that their favorite imaginary being has granted them 'dominion' over the living Earth despite how obviously it isn't true. Man invented "Gods" originally to assuage their fears of the unknown and the unknowable, but that ability to embrace self deception has turned out to be just another 'Deal with the Devil'.
At one time women, children and 'colored people' were judged to have no souls by the Church, so slavery was well within the moral bounds. Hell, in 1905 the Americans put a young pygmy warrior in a monkey house display in the Bronx Zoo. Nowadays all humans are understood to have souls and to be conscious and thereby to have certain rights and responsibilities. Nowadays we draw our metaphysical line in the sand at the end of our genomic baggage. Hopefully one day humans won't draw these lines anymore.
Every seed is awakened and so is all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our animal neighbours the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. -Sitting Bull
