Posted by Maureen
Bear viewing vs trophy hunting …
As a co-founder of the Commercial Bear Viewing Association (CBVA) and also as a company that takes people for amazing bear viewing experiences, we’re very interested in this campaign by conservation groups and First Nations to ban the trophy hunt of bears in B.C.
For one thing, the CBVA has supported this campaign.
For another, we know that bear viewing is a more sustainable and larger part of B.C.’s economy than trophy hunting. Shoot a bear with a gun and that’s it – it’s gone. No-one else will see it. (Or have much chance of getting trust from bears in that area again for a while).
Shoot a bear with your Canon camera and you and anyone else can come back and quietly, respectfully see it again … the next day, the next year, in three years. What’s more, you’ll see its natural behaviour, its interactions with other bears, and the changes it experiences over time.
And that’s not even getting into the ethics of killing very intelligent mammals for fun.
We view bears on almost all of our trips, but prime areas for them are the Great Bear Rainforest, Alaska adventure and our Vancouver Island’s Wild Side trip.
Here is the press release:
https://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Coastal-First-Nations-962448.html
And here is an earlier study by Integral Economics and Raincoast about the economics of viewing vs hunting.
Thanks to Maple Leaf Adventures guest Richard Tenney for this photo of bear viewing in the Great Bear Rainforest!
