By Craig Pittman, Florida Phoenix
Dear Bears of Florida:
I’m really sorry. In case you haven’t heard, last week the cabal of developers that Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to “protect” you and Florida’s other wildlife voted to allow people to hunt you with guns, bows and arrows, and even, a year from now, dogs.
Related: Florida to resume bear hunting for first time since 2015.
There was a ton of opposition to the decision. Of 13,000 online comments, three-quarters came from people against the hunt. This is just like 10 years ago, the last time they voted to hold a hunt despite strong public opposition. That one turned into a colossal disaster, with hunters — in only two days! — killing 304 bears, nearly the entire weeklong quota allowed, including 34 lactating females. I’m betting this one will be just as disastrous.
There’s still a chance the hunt could be halted before it begins in December. An environmental group called Bear Warriors United has filed a legal challenge, seeking to overturn the decision by the Florida Fish and Wildlife “Conservation” Commission.
Raquel Levy (Image via Raquel Levy)
Katrina Shadix (Image via screengrab)
“The very agency that’s been entrusted to protect these animals is now in the business of destroying them,” Raquel Levy, the attorney at the Atlantic Law Center who’s handling the case pro bono for Bear Warriors United, told me.
If the name of Levy’s client sounds familiar, it’s probably because Bear Warriors United recently won a huge lawsuit against the Florida Department of Environmental Protection over how that state agency failed to protect manatees from the consequences of water pollution.
“In a state where it’s so hard to ever win anything for the environment in court,” Katrina Shadix, founder of Bear Warriors United, told me at the time, “this is a big victory.”
As for her new suit, Shadix said she hopes it will “shine a bright light to expose the FWC’s culture of corruption, as well as demonstrate the desperate and immediate need for massive agency reform.”
Shadix isn’t guaranteed to win this case, even though she won the last one. But after reading over the suit, I have to tell you bears that I think she’s got a chance at saving your furry hides.
It’s about science and the law — or rather, the lack thereof.
Flying blind
We humans frequently joke about you bears doing, ummmm, certain things in the woods. We’ve even featured you in a series of ridiculous toilet paper commercials based on that joke.
But the truth is, we don’t really know a lot about what you do in the woods. Our ignorance is so vast, it includes not knowing how many of you there are.
Before the disastrous 2015 Florida bear hunt, scientists estimated there were about 4,300 of you wandering in what was left of our wilderness.
Ten years later, biologists are still working on coming up with an accurate count. But they have produced another estimate. Now they estimate there are 4,050 of you doing your business in the woods.
I’m no wild-haired math wizard like Albert Einstein, but even I can see that’s fewer than we had a decade ago. Yet despite that disparity, the commissioners seemed hell-bent on blowing some of you away.
By the way, I should mention that about 300 of you bears get killed each year by humans — drivers of cars and trucks, mostly, plus a few poachers. (By contrast, the death of an 89-year-old man in Collier County in May marked the first time in recorded history that a Florida bear killed a human being.)
I wish we humans were doing something to prevent that, such as building more wildlife underpasses andoverpasses. Instead, a small percentage of us seem bound and determined to kill even more of you.
Rodney Barreto (image via screen grab)
During the commission meeting last week, Commission Chairman Rodney Barreto — who recently got caught lying under oath to a legislative committee — bragged about the process behind their vote.
“We make decisions based on science,” said Barreto, a wealthy developer.
The lawsuit says just the opposite is true, accusing the FWC of “flying blind as to the black bear population in making decisions.”
Interpreting the language
I have a theory that we human Florida natives grow up hearing so many bogus sales pitches that we become experts at picking out what’s really being said.
George Warthen of Fish Wildlife Commission (Image via screen grab)
During last week’s wildlife commission meeting, the FWC’s conservation director, George Warthen, laid out the hunt’s reasons and rules. More than once, he said that a hunt “provides access to the resource.”
When he said that, what I heard was: “All the Elmer Fudd wannabes get to blast away at more wild animals, woo-hoo!”
Warthen also talked about how your population has expanded since 1992, which was nice to hear. But he never mentioned that your population appears to have declined in the last decade.
Why not? Perhaps because it didn’t fit the narrative that his bosses wanted to hear.
But failing to discuss that sets up the Bear Warriors United lawsuit, which takes aim — oops, sorry! — at the lack of science underlying the vote. It calls the rules of the hunt “woefully vague and unsupported by any current scientific evidence.”
For his presentation, Warthen went through a PowerPoint that included, on a single slide, the date upon which the official bear population estimates were made.
The FWC has divided the state into seven “bear management units,” and for three of them, the date of the most recent population estimate is 2015. A fourth one is from 2014 — before the last hunt. In other words, those numbers are out of date.
Warthen talked about how these population numbers were “good for a generation” but what I think he meant was, “We don’t really have any recent estimate for most of the bear population, but I know y’all are going to do what you want anyway.”
He talked about the amount of habitat occupied by you bears. You’re probably feeling squeezed by all the development going on these days, some of which was done by members of the wildlife commission. While the bear population has declined, the human population has definitely ballooned.
But Warthen told his bosses that you have enough habitat now for the 4,000 or so that live here. Here’s how he spun that:
“While there is enough habitat to support our current bear population, a highly regulated hunt would prevent future negative impacts.”
What I heard was: “If we let hunters kill enough bears now, then the developers who basically run the DeSantis administration can continue destroying even more of their habitat.”
The Floridian interpretation game got really fun when Barreto started bragging about what a great job the commission has been doing.
First he mentioned how alligators have bounced back from the days when they were considered an endangered species. Then he said, “Manatees have been an incredible success story for Florida.”
What he failed to mention is that the comebacks occurred while these species were protected from hunting. In fact, it’s been illegal to kill a manatee in Florida since 1893.
As of 2019, the FWC estimated that there were about 6,000 manatees swimming around Florida. They’re classified as a threatened species, and yet their population is larger than yours. File that under what Arsenio Hall used to call, “Things that make you go hmmmm.”
Considering the massive manatee die-off caused by the loss of seagrass beds, I don’t think we’ll be seeing the commission declare an open season on sea cows anytime soon. But hey, you never know!
The founding father
The FWC is itself a rare creature. It’s the only state-run wildlife agency in America that’s set up to be an independent commission.
Clay Henderson via subject
“The idea was to get politics out of wildlife management,” said Clay Henderson, a longtime Florida environmental activist and lawyer.
Henderson is credited with writing the part of the state Constitution that created the wildlife commission. Now, he told me, “I’m the founding father who’s disappointed in his children.”
The state has a Black Bear Management Plan, approved in 2019, that’s intended to govern everything the commission does as it deals with its bear issues, he pointed out. The commission ignored that plan in voting to bring back the hunt, he said.
The Bear Management Plan is supposed to be the blueprint for statewide black bear management until 2027. It emphasizes conflict resolution, habitat protection, and teaching people who move into your habitat how to get along with you, since you were here first.
The Bear Management Plan also encourages the commissioners to use their statutory and constitutional powers to influence land use and development decisions in bear habitat.
Barreto, on the other hand, made a big deal last week about how the commissioners have no control over land-use decisions. He insisted they can’t do anything to protect your habitat from being paved over.
Bowing to a minority
I grew up hunting in the Panhandle, so I’m familiar with the joys of tromping around in the woods to “access the resource” with a Remington 12-gauage.
As a student of Florida history, I also know how important hunters have been in preserving our most important environmental spaces, including the Big Cypress Swamp.
These days, though, hunting is no longer a popular pastime. Only one out of 100 people in Florida owns a hunting license. Yet our public agencies continue acting with extreme deference toward what this small group of people want.
Last December, the FWC staff presented to the commissioners a routine update on the bear management plan. They offered no recommendations for changes.
Wildlife commissioner Gary Lester, via FWC
But almost as soon as the biologist was done speaking, Commissioner Gary Lester,who works for the developer of The Villages, piped up.
He said he wanted the staff to bring back a proposal for a bear hunt.
There was no preamble, no lengthy discussion, not even a statement of why he wanted it. He just dropped that bombshell and his colleagues voted to make it so.
Lester, by the way, is the person who made the motion last week to approve the unscientific hunting proposal for this year.
When the motion passed, Barreto smirked at the crowd and said, “Anybody surprised?”
Delegating life and death
Here’s the other problem with what the commissioners voted for: It’s unconstitutional.
The item that they voted on specifically calls for holding not just one bear hunt, but bear hunts every year from here on out.
But the commissioners agreed to leave it up to their executive director to pick the dates, set the number of bears to be killed and work out the other details, such as how many hunting licenses to issue. They didn’t even set a specific number of bears to be killed this December. That, too, was left to their executive director.
“They’re delegating these important life-and-death decisions,” Henderson said. “They did this deliberately, so they don’t have to go through the public hearing process every time.”
Considering that nearly 200 people lined up last week to tell the commissioners what they thought of them, you can see why they might want to skip that in 2026, 2027, and so on. But the law says they can’t avoid taking that heat.
Handing off their authority to the executive director is not allowed under the rules for how the commission is set up, said Henderson, who probably knows more about those rules than anyone else.
Thus, the Bear Warriors United lawsuit attacks that weakness as well.
“By removing the bear hunt decision to the ‘executive director or designee,’ the public is denied the due process to be heard concerning the issue and to have the constitutionally appointed officers make the decision,” the lawsuit says.
In a way, though, the ultimate decision on this matter is up to a different public official. I’m talking about the guy who thought it would be a good idea to build golf courses in our state parks and set up a prison camp in the Big Cypress National Preserve.
All seven wildlife commissioners were appointed by Ron DeSantis. One of their number, Gary Nicklaus (yes, the son of the Golden Bear himself, Jack Nicklaus), apparently felt uncomfortable voting for hunting the non-golden variety. He resigned mere days before last week’s meeting.
Commissioner Joshua Kellam (Image Fish and Wildlife Commission)
DeSantis — who waited six months to appoint a replacement for his lieutenant governor — fairly leapt to appoint a replacement for Nicklaus ahead of the vote. His pick, who took office two days before the meeting: Joshua Kellam, president of a Palm Beach development and mining company. You can probably guess which way he voted on hunting you poor bears.
My point here is that if the Bear Warriors United lawsuit succeeds in overturning the wildlife commission vote, that’s good for you guys as well as for the value of public opinion in shaping public policy.
But if the Division of Administrative Hearings rules against the Bear Warriors United suit, then it’s time for you bears to act. I can’t tell you what to do, but if you were to show up in large numbers at the governor’s mansion to show him what you normally do in the woods, I think everyone would completely understand.
