Push for new Florida bear hunt ignores real source of problems: Humans

The Context

Implementing a bear hunt in Florida, particularly in Orange and Seminole Counties encompassing the Wekiva River System, presents several concerns:

1. Ineffectiveness in Reducing Human-Bear Conflicts

Evidence suggests that hunting does not effectively decrease human-bear interactions. Opponents argue that non-lethal strategies, such as securing garbage, are more effective in addressing bear populations.

2. Successful Non-Lethal Management in Seminole County

Seminole County has demonstrated that non-lethal measures can effectively manage bear populations. In 2024, the county received 308 bear-related calls, a significant reduction from previous years, with negative conflicts kept under 50%. This success is attributed to ordinances and community efforts aimed at reducing attractants like unsecured garbage.

3. Potential Negative Impact on the Wekiva River Ecosystem

The Wekiva River System, spanning Orange and Seminole Counties, is a designated Wild and Scenic River, recognized for its outstanding ecological values. A bear hunt could disrupt the ecological balance, affecting not only black bears but also other species and habitats within this sensitive ecosystem.

4. Public Opposition and Legal Challenges

There is notable public opposition to bear hunting in Florida. In 2015, conservation groups, including Speak Up Wekiva, legally challenged the hunt, highlighting concerns about its impact and the state's management practices. This opposition reflects a broader public sentiment against bear hunting in the region.

Given these factors, initiating a bear hunt in Orange and Seminole Counties, particularly within the Wekiva River System, may not be advisable. Focusing on non-lethal management strategies and community engagement appears to be a more effective and publicly supported approach to managing bear populations in this area.

While precise population figures for Apopka are unavailable, the area is known for frequent human-bear interactions. Apopka's proximity to habitats such as the Seminole State Forest, Rock Springs Run State Reserve, and Wekiva Springs State Park contributes to these encounters. Residents are advised to secure attractants like garbage and pet food to minimize interactions.

Orange and Seminole Counties:

Specific bear population estimates for Orange and Seminole Counties are not readily available. However, the Central Bear Management Unit (BMU), which includes these counties, was estimated to have over 1,200 bears as of 2015.

This region, encompassing areas from the Ocala National Forest to the Wekiva area, supports the largest bear population in the state.

It's important to note that bear populations are dynamic, influenced by factors such as habitat changes, food availability, and human activities.

Craig Pittman, an environmental columnist for Florida Phoenix, writes (below) about the disasterous first Florida bear hunt over 10 years ago, and the potential for another catastrophe if the Florida Legislature greenlights another in this session.

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The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is once again considering holding a bear hunt. To me, this is like saying, “The captain of the Titanic in interested in sailing straight toward the nearest iceberg, because it went SO well last time.”

The last bear hunt was a decade ago. I was there, so trust me when I tell you it was a disaster for both the bears and the FWC. James Cameron didn’t direct a movie about it, the way he did for the Titanic, but he could have.

The hunt was supposed to last a whole week. Instead, after hunters killed 304 bears in just two days, the wildlife commission’s executive director shut it down early. Of that number, 36 lactating mama bears were slain, meaning there were probably some cubs left orphaned.

One critic of the hunt, Chuck O’Neal of Speak Up Wekiva, said it was as challenging as hunting dairy cows. The bears were that laid back and easy to target.

I am hopeful that this latest attempt to let people shoot at Florida’s fairly rare bears can be blocked before a single gun is cocked. 

A good question to ask them might be: “Commissioners, how can you hold a hunt to kill bears when you can’t even say for sure how many bears there are?”

That question is one that even bothers the pro-hunting folks.

‘Warranted but precluded’

Every day, about 900 new people move to Florida. Most of them have no idea we have bears here — or that the new home they just bought was built in what probably used to be bear habitat.

Then when a bear shows up to hang out on their porch, or swing in their hammock or chillax in their hot tub, they freak out and call 911 as if it’s the bear that’s the intruder.

Florida’s bears are smaller than grizzlies, reaching a maximum of only 750 pounds (compared to more than 1,000 for their Western relatives). Their diet mostly consists of berries, acorns, and insects. That means they usually have no interest in gobbling up you or your little dog too.

They once roamed all over the state, but between hunting and rampant development of their habitat, their population dwindled to just a few hundred by the 1970s. That’s when the state listed them as threatened.

There was talk of putting them on the federal endangered list too. But in 1992, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said listing the Florida black bear was “warranted but precluded” under the Endangered Species Act.

What that meant was that other species needed protection more urgently and the government simply didn’t have enough dough to cover the bears too.

Six years later, though, the federal agency decided the bears did not need protecting after all. Agency officials said they were confident Florida’s bears had a “stable” future, thanks to the state’s strict land management rules created by the 1985 Growth Management Act.

Those are the rules that developers persuaded then-Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature to ditch in 2011. They dumped them in favor of our current system, which is based on approving development wherever developers want to build it, no matter what problems may result.

Meanwhile, the FWC took bears off the state’s own imperiled wildlife list in 2012. The trouble started the following year.

Swiping berries from the bears

With so many people moving into the bears’ habitat, conflicts were bound to happen. Sure enough, bears made a series of violent attacks on humans between 2013 and 2015.

The bears were hungry and had wandered into areas where they found loose garbage can lids and the people who owned the cans. One Central Florida man, claiming he was “the Bear Whisperer,” had even been feeding them by hand. At least, he did so until one of his neighbors was attacked.

Why were the bears rooting in garbage cans? It was the state’s own fault.

In its infinite wisdom, the state Agriculture Department was letting people harvest unlimited amounts of saw palmetto berries from Florida’s 37 state forests. The berry-pickers paid $10 for the right to collect an unlimited amount of berries. Then they would sell them to companies marketing them as a questionable cure for men’s sexual problems.

No, I am not making that up. Erectile dysfunction led to ecosystem dysfunction.

Once the link between the berry collectors and the bear attacks became clear, the state halted the unlimited berry-picking in state forests. But by then, some members of the FWC had decided the best solution was to shoot a lot of bears for the first time in 21 years.

Tens of thousands of people wrote in to urge the commissioners not to do it. When I asked the commission’s pro-hunting chairman, Tampa mall developer Richard Corbett, why the board was ignoring the public’s wishes, he about chewed my head off.

“Those people don’t know what they’re talking about,” Corbett barked at me. “Most of those people have never been in the woods. They think we’re talking about teddy bears: ‘Oh Lord, don’t hurt my little teddy bear!’ Well, these bears are dangerous.” (Amid the subsequent uproar over Corbett’s rant, he resigned.)

Of course, the hunt showed which animal in Florida is the more dangerous one. Proposals for a follow-up hunt the next year were, pardon the pun, shot down.

Yet ever since then, we’ve continued killing the bears — sometimes via poaching but more commonly by hitting them with our cars. About 300 died on Florida’s roadways last year.

Then came the December wildlife commission meeting.

‘Very succinct’

The commissioners, meeting in Lakeland, had a lot to talk about — gopher tortoise management, manatee protection zones, stone crabs, and so forth. But before they got to that stuff, they had scheduled “a 5-year update on implementation of the 2019 Florida Black Bear Management Plan.”

The update, delivered by a well-respected state bear expert named Mike Orlando, included, according to the agenda, “an overview of bear management efforts and current research activities.” The subject of hunting was not on the agenda, but it came up anyway.

If you want, you can watch the meeting the way I did this week, on video from the Florida Channel. It’s fascinating.

First comes Orlando’s extensive and factual report on all that the scientists are doing, which includes his comment that they are not recommending any changes right now to what the commission is doing.

Then comes a long line of public commenters, some of whom say they believe it’s time for another hunt and some of whom say no new hunt is needed or wanted. One speaker, Katrina Shadix of Bear Warriors United, told the commissioners the state’s human population was the one that had exceeded its carrying capacity, not the bear population.

One thing both sides said, over and over, is that they’d like to see an updated, statewide population figure for the bears. Orlando said the scientists were working on it, but that such a number would not be ready until 2029.

As soon as the public commenters were done, Commission Chairman Rodney Barreto, a Coral Gables developer (do you see a trend here?), asked if any of the commissioners had anything to say. Commissioner Gary Lester, who works for the developer of mega-retirement mecca The Villages, was the first to pipe up.

“I’ll be very succinct,” he said. “I would like to see a proposal from staff for a bear hunt.”

That slippery sound you hear is the commission’s skids being greased.

“For the FWC to even consider a hunt before these [population] studies are complete is outrageously irresponsible, dangerous and just plain WRONG!” Shadix told me via email.

The alligator wrestler

One of the people I talked to about this was a former wildlife commissioner, Ronald “Alligator Ron” Bergeron.

Bergeron got his nickname because he once tried to wrestle an alligator. It nearly drowned him before he punched it in the snout and made it turn loose of his hand.

Bergeron, who’s also been a rodeo champ and a python hunter, is not a shy guy. He was on the wildlife commission in 2015, and he was the lone commissioner who voted against holding the last bear hunt.

He counseled his colleagues to slow down their unseemly rush to approve a hunt for a creature he first saw from his grandfather’s airboat at age 5. Bears are an icon of the Florida wild and should be given respect, he contended.

“I believe that we need to evaluate, take our time a little bit here,” he told them. They ignored him.

A year later, his was the loudest voice calling for the commission not to repeat that debacle. That time, his colleagues listened to him.

When we talked this week, Bergeron introduced me to his daughter, Diamond, who is taking over his Bergeron Everglades Foundation. She was at the December wildlife commission meeting and noticed the same thing I did.

Before holding the hunt in 2015, the FWC’s scientists estimated there were about 4,300 bears, but they were still counting at that point. The commission pushed ahead with the hunt anyway.

The most recent numbers from FWC’s scientists are still an estimate, not a precise count. And the latest estimate, 10 years after that botched hunt, is that there are 4,050 bears. No gains, just a dip from a decade ago.

“I don’t think they know how many bears there are in the state,” Diamond Bergeron said. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.”

The key to allowing humans to hunt wild animals is sustainability, the former wildlife commissioner told me. If you don’t know how many bears there are, how can you be sure we won’t kill too many in a hunt? How can you guarantee this important species will remain a part of wild Florida?

Considering there have been no further incidents in which bears mauled people, as there were before the last hunt, what’s supposed to be the goal of holding a new hunt?

That’s why, Bergeron said, “I don’t think any different than I thought in 2015. I don’t believe [a hunt] is necessary.”

And his daughter pointed out another figure, one that I had missed. In 2024, Orlando and his staff fielded the fewest number of human complaints about bears in the past five years, she said.

So, if there are fewer conflicts between humans and bears, and no recent attacks by bears, and fewer bears than there were 10 years ago, then what’s the point of hunting them?

There are signs that this is part of a long game by a small group that’s been planning for a long time to push the state into another hunt. And they fooled the voters on this last fall.

Who’s inundating whom

Last year, some of the same people who want a bear hunt pushed through a vote on a strange state constitutional amendment that said hunting and fishing are recognized as rights under the law.

The measure was sponsored by Sanford Sen. Jason Brodeur, who’s such a friend to the environment that he won a 2021 award from the Florida Home Builders Association.

It seemed like a pointless exercise, because no one was calling for a ban on either hunting or fishing. But some people — I was one — opposed this amendment because it also said that hunting and fishing would become the “preferred method” of wildlife management in Florida.

Hunting and fishing did not save the manatee or any other creature, including the bear. To give those practices preference in wildlife management seemed like an effort to tie the hands of scientists.

The measure passed anyway. Several of the folks who spoke in December in favor of a new bear hunt cited that constitutional amendment as a reason to hold a new hunt, contending the voters wanted one.

These claims are about as valid as those of Rep. Jason Shoaf, R-Shoot-em-up, who apparently saw a movie called “Cocaine Bear” and believed it to be a documentary. He claimed last year that bears on drugs were wreaking havoc in Florida.

“We’re talking about the ones that are on crack, and they break your door down, and they’re standing in your living room growling and tearing your house apart,” Shoaf told a House committee considering an anti-bear bill he was pushing.

Florida’s bears are, unlike some Florida politicians, drug-free. Yet Shoaf’s dopey bill allowing poachers to claim they were standing their ground against drugged-up bears passed both houses and was signed into law.

Shoaf, by the way, has been calling for a new bear hunt since 2023.

“We really need a bear hunt,” he told the News Service of Florida two years ago. “It’s what we need here in North Florida. We’re inundated. We’ve got way too many.”

I think we need to send Rep. Shoaf, Commissioner Lester, and several other folks to some remedial math courses. That way maybe they can understand that what we’re “inundated” with is humans, not bears. Our growing population is crowding the bears, not the other way around.

I’d also like to require them all to watch something — no, not the movie “Titanic,” but another boating related entertainment. It’s one of the earliest TV shows about Florida, which starred Dennis Weaver as an airboat-piloting game warden whose son had a pet bear.

It was called “Gentle Ben.”

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Disclosure: Research and sourcing for the "Context" portion of this article was produced using ChatGPT, an AI language model, to enhance research, generate ideas, or draft content. The Apopka Voice performed all final edits and fact-checking to ensure accuracy and alignment with our journalistic standards.