An article (warning: some content may be disturbing to some viewers) appeared recently on a website called Outdoorhub entitled, “Choosing the Best Outfitter for a Manitoba Black Bear Hunt.” Notwithstanding an ad on the same website telling us that Quebec is the best province in which to kill bears, it seems that Manitoba is a “bear hunter’s dream” by virtue of having bigger bears than, presumably, those wimpy little bears you get in, say, another province, or somewhere like New Jersey or Arizona.
“Manitoba,” it says, “has a reputation for producing extremely large black bears. Besides Toledo-popping fall weights, black bears in the heart of Canada have the skulls to match their weight. One look through the record books and it isn’t hard to tell that Manitoba has the genetics for producing bears that hunters usually only dream of finding.”
What genetics really tell us is that Manitoba has the same subspecies of bear found in Pennsylvania, and much of Canada and the eastern U.S. After talking about Manitoba’s 250,00 square miles and lack of “infrastructure” the article continues: “It is estimated that the Manitoba black bear population could be as high as 30,000 to 50,000 animals and with only 1,657 resident hunters in 2017/18, it isn’t hard to deduce that most bears never see a hunter.”
This is another example of hunters unwittingly providing an argument against hunting by admitting that hunters decide which genetically inheritable traits get passed to the next generation. Put in evolutionary terms, natural selection, which favors traits valuable to survival of the species, is usurped by hunters who eliminate those traits by killing the animals that have them. In bears, such a trait is apparently size; the bigger the better. Manitoban bears don’t have some size-determining heritable trait that other bears lack. The biggest wild American black bear ever recorded – who was shot in 1972 – came from New Brunswick, Canada. Massive bears have also been shot in Arizona (1921) and New Jersey (2011).
If the article is correct in its premise – that hunters kill off the bigger bears, giving smaller ones a better chance of passing on their genes, including those that determine size – the situation is analogous to the unfortunate emergence of increasing numbers of tuskless elephants in Africa. There, “selection” against the tusk-producing genes is driven by poachers seeking tusks for the ivory trade. For an elephant without tusks the disadvantages – an inability to defend themselves, dig for vital water, gather food, or protect their trunks – are outweighed by the one huge advantage: you are more likely to be ignored by poachers and thus produce another generation.
This is a difficult to explain in the U.S., where polls indicate that only about 32% of the public believes in evolution as a natural process. But, facts increasingly indicate that what we are is determined by our genes, our DNA, and that is determined by who breeds and who does not. Dead animals don’t breed and when animals are killed for some genetically determined feature – size, for example, or tusks – it is, long term, bad for the species, and, ironically, eliminates the very traits that were valued by the killers.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
