With an eight-year hiatus, many in the state of Florida are calling on Governor Ron DeSantis to revisit the possibility of bear hunting with the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).
Calling out the governor is Franklin County Sheriff A.J. Smith who’s county has seemingly been suffering the most by trying to reduce bear and human conflicts. Franklin County is a rural county located southwest of the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee and holds one of the highest concentrations of black bears in the Sunshine State.
With incidents on the rise, including a rogue bear spotted in a tree at Disney World just last week, many residents and officials are pleading with state legislators to help deal with the growing problem.
“I’m not a bear biologist, but you know we keep having bear (incidents),” Smith said. “The old way is to keep your garbage picked up, which I agree with. We’ve got to do the best we can with our garbage. But ‘get a whistle,’ ‘we’ll send you a pamphlet,’ I mean that kind of stuff is not going to do anything because we have a much larger bear population because we’ve been protecting bears for so long.”
Calling the state’s bear program the perfect example of “mismanagement”, particularly in East Panhandle Bear Management Unit, Smith has asked DeSantis to have the bear discussion included at the FWC’s October meeting next week in Jensen Beach.
“This county and the citizens that I serve are being inundated and overrun by the bear population,” Smith wrote. “There are senior citizens, mothers with small children, and families with livestock and pets that are afraid to utilize the private and public lands of this county.”
Earlier this year a review on black bears was requested but not received in time, causing officials to call off any possibility of a bear hunt in 2023. The issue has been a contentious one in Florida for a number of decades, with the last hunt taking place in 2015.
In 2019 a 10-year plan for managing bears was approved by the commission that relies mainly on non-lethal options for dealing with black bears.
While hunting still remains an option under the plan, it will need to see bear-human interactions continue to swell to become a reality.