Anti-Hunters Try to Sabotage Florida Bear Hunt by Flooding Lottery

As Florida strikes ahead with plans to reinstate a regulated black bear hunt for the primary time since 2015, opponents of the hunt from world wide are mobilizing an unconventional tactic — making use of for the lottery hunt en masse. If these anti-hunters draw a tag, they’ll maintain onto it, successfully stopping a authorized, well-intended bear hunter from drawing. Their aim is to flood the lottery and, theoretically, scale back the variety of bears harvested. 

“By no means in my life did I believe I’d be a hunter,” Chuck O’Neal, president of Speak Up Wekiva, a grassroots group devoted to defending the Wekiva River and its watershed, instructed Naples Daily News. “Now that we have now a constitutional proper to hunt, I would as nicely benefit from that.”

O’Neal was sarcastically referring to Amendment 2, Florida’s new constitutional modification that ensures the fitting to hunt and fish for anybody with a correct license. Handed in 2024 with greater than 67 % help from the Florida citizens, the modification protects particular person participation in looking and fishing. Additionally, it identifies these actions because the “most well-liked technique of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife.”

O’Neal and different opponents of the bear hunt argue that Modification 2 makes it doable for them to buy a license and apply for one of many black bear permits, that are prone to be allotted this 12 months. 

“We’ll put in just a few occasions or just a few hundred occasions. It’s an equal alternative to enter this. I have to admit, I’m not an excellent marksman. I could kill a bear with kindness,” O’Neal said. 

Nonetheless, the particular language of the modification might complicate the protest effort. It is probably not unlawful to buy a tag and keep residence, however the coordinated effort to impede authorized looking entry appears to run afoul of the spirit of Modification 2, which was supposed to ensure Floridians the fitting to hunt, not simply to buy a license. If anti-hunters snatch up a big amount of the state’s obtainable bear permits, it might rob others of their constitutionally protected proper. It additionally strips the state of the administration instrument that the modification prioritizes. 

It’s unclear how FWC would forestall anti-hunters from making use of or if there could be any punishment for drawing with the intention of limiting looking alternative for others. 

Including to the complexity of the problem is Florida’s utility course of. The state requires people to finish a hunter safety course earlier than buying a license. If non-hunters apply for the black bear lottery with out finishing the required course, they gained’t have the ability to purchase a allow, even when they’re drawn within the lottery. This might restrict the protest’s potential impression (until, in fact, these candidates are keen to finish hunter training). 

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The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Fee maintains the hunt is important to handle the state’s rising black bear inhabitants and to mitigate rising human-bear conflicts, together with a latest fatal attack on an 88-year-old man in Collier County. The FWC voted 4-1 to provide preliminary approval for the hunt on Could 15. A remaining vote on the proposed hunt, which might allot 187 black bear tags, is scheduled for August. The FWC was not instantly obtainable for touch upon whether or not the state has a plan to handle protester-driven lottery entries.