Friday, November 17, 2006


By TOM BALDWIN
Gannett State Bureau

A national hunting alliance will pursue its lawsuit to force a New Jersey bear hunt this year even after the state's top environmental official announced the hunt was off.

"We are going to amend our lawsuit to challenge the commissioner's revoking the policies," Douglas Burdin, a lawyer for Safari Club International, said Thursday.

"We are going to ask the court to take it on an emergency basis, and get it done in time to hold this hunt," said Burdin, whose Washington-based organization bills itself as a hunting and conservation advocate.

The hunt was supposed to start in about two weeks, running Dec. 4 through 9.

Burdin said he will refresh an earlier filing with the appellate division of state Superior Court to include Wednesday night's hunt-suspension letter from Lisa Jackson, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection.

Jackson agreed with Gov. Jon S. Corzine when she reasoned that other, nonlethal ways of preventing bear-human contacts should come first before shooting the animals.

The staging of two bear hunts over the past three years, the first in about three decades in New Jersey, besieged the governors' offices with a sea of anger from anti-hunting advocates enraged further by news photos of dead bears strapped to SUVs.

But hunters and many who live among the bears say the population is dangerously oversized. They warn of attacks as bears connect humans with a food source, be it garbage, backyard grills, bird feeders or marshmallows on a picnic table.

Typical of the liberal northeast. Just let a child be mauled by a "cuddly" "cute" black bear and see where the outrage comes from. Remember mr. Grizzley Man who was eaten along with his blond bimbett. He thought protecting bears was his mission in life. Granted the eastern black bear is not the savage that the Alaskin Grizzly is, but we have had several injured and killed tourist in the Great Smokey Mtn.s National Park and Cherokee National Forest over the last couple of years.
If New Jersey can not bring itself to allow the population to be effectivly managed, they are welcome to send the excess to Blount County, Alabama. We know how to take care of dangerous animals. We do not have children and women eaten along the creeks of Blount County any more by the now extinct Giant Blount county Crocodiles anymore for that very reason.
God save us from uninformed good intentions.

Judge Sharpe