https://www.thestar.com/news/c...76-778b6159b426.html


Conservation group buys out hunting rights in B.C. rainforest to protect wildlife

Green group buys out hunters in B.C. rainforest

VICTORIA - A conservation group says its latest purchase of exclusive hunting rights in a British Columbia rainforest is a major step toward protecting the area's wildlife, but hunters say the move is an "abuse" of the licensing system.

By Chuck Chiang The Canadian Press
Thursday, January 4, 2024

Conservation group buys out hunting rights in B.C. rainforest to protect wildlife

A British Columbia conservation group says it has purchased a vast hunting tenure covering more than a quarter of the Great Bear Rainforest on the province's north and central coast to protect wildlife there. The then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge along with then premier of British Columbia Christy Clark walk through the rainforest in Bella Bella, B.C., Monday, Sept 26, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward


VICTORIA - A conservation group says its latest purchase of exclusive hunting rights in a British Columbia rainforest is a major step toward protecting the area's wildlife, but hunters say the move is an "abuse" of the licensing system.

The Raincoast Conservation Foundation, based in Sidney, B.C., said Thursday that it raised $1.92 million over two years to buy the rights from hunters that covers roughly a quarter — or 18,000 square kilometres — of the Great Bear Rainforest on the province's north and central coast.

Raincoast's guide outfitter co-ordinator Brian Falconer said the group has fulfilled all aspects of the purchase except the physical transfer of the hunting licenses, a process that is being completed.


The province confirmed in a statement that it has received the application to transfer the certificate, and the transaction was being reviewed.

Falconer said they will continue to buy more hunting rights to achieve the ultimate goal of eliminating commercial trophy hunting completely in the Great Bear Rainforest.

The purchase makes Raincoast the largest hunting tenure holder in B.C., covering more than 56,000 square kilometres.

"Literally hundreds of animals every year, including particularly the trophy species like grizzly bear, black bear, wolves, cougars, those are the real trophy species, those are not being killed now," he said.

He said it assures there are healthy populations of animals, particularly carnivores, all through the Great Bear Rainforest.


Raincoast has been buying hunting rights in the province since 2005, after a 2001 moratorium on grizzly bear hunting approved by an NDP government was overturned when the Liberals were elected to government.

The province again brought in a ban on grizzly hunting in 2017 after the NDP returned to power, but Falconer said Raincoast will continue its efforts because there are many other species the group can protect by controlling hunting tenures.

"We are required to do hunts in order to maintain these territories at this point," Falconer said.

"We've been very unsuccessful at those hunts, and so the harvest rate has gone down to zero in those properties, " he said. "We just have very, very poor hunters."

In the place of commercial hunting, Raincoast has been encouraging ecotourism in the regions where they hold tenure, another intentional move that Falconer said is aimed to show the economic potential of a sustainable industry based on wildlife.

"It is lighting the path to a new, conservation-based economy that is not dependent on killing and extracting things," he said.

Raincoast's purchases, however, have upset the group Hunters for B.C., which says the move amounts to abusing commercial licensing to stifle legal hunting activities.

The group's president Robin Unrau said the 2017 ban on grizzly hunting put several outfitters in a difficult financial situation, which gave conservation groups like Raincoast an opportunity to the buy tenures from hunters with the plan to not hunt.

"Whether they're taking them out hunting physically or whether it's just on paper to look good, it should be written better that a hunting tenure is for the purpose of hunting and not as we say just going through the motion on paper and using this propaganda," Unrau said.

He said the move to limit commercial hunting also isn't addressing the key challenge facing species like the grizzly, which is habitat protection.

Unrau said hunting, when done responsibly, is actually a key tool in maintaining biodiversity and balance in a given region, and Hunters for B.C. are members of the Fish, Wildlife and Habitat Coalition that play a role in conservation efforts.

"Protectionism is fantastic," he said. "It has to have its time and place.

"There's always two sides to a story; if conservation organizations or environmental groups choose not to really look at the big picture, which is the habitat. If we're not able to look at that, I think it's a failure on all our part for the wildlife."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 4, 2024

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conservation

My butt they ae just a bunch of anti's that hate humans.

These guys have lots of money, check out what some of their top brass pays itself.

https://globalnews.ca/news/102...%202022%20and%202023.

They bought a hunting concession but resident hunters can still hunt. The biggest problem is the outfitters are selling out because of the Grizzly bear closures. This is the biggest profit for the outfitters and now they can’t make a living, the article said they started this 2 years ago so the same timeframe as the Grizzly closer. It’s all a well planned assault on hunters.

quote:

They bought a hunting concession but resident hunters can still hunt. The biggest problem is the outfitters are selling out because of the Grizzly bear closures. This is the biggest profit for the outfitters and now they can’t make a living, the article said they started this 2 years ago so the same timeframe as the Grizzly closer. It’s all a well planned assault on hunters.

Very true

https://www.fieldandstream.com...ing-lease-in-canada/



An Anti-Hunting Group is Buying Up Millions of Dollars Worth of Commercial Hunting Permits in Canada

With its latest purchase of a 4 million-acre "hunting tenure," the Raincoast Conservation Coalition is now the largest holder of commercial hunting licenses in the Province of British Columbia

BY TRAVIS HALL | PUBLISHED JAN 9, 2024 2:07 PM EST

CONSERVATION


After two years of fundraising, a Canadian environmental group known as the Rainforest Conservation Coalition has purchased the exclusive rights to guide non-resident hunters in a huge swath of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest. The group won’t be guiding any hunters any time soon though, at least not successfully. Instead, the Rainforest Conservation Coalition purchased the massive outfitting lease—known in Canada as a guiding tenure—as a way to lock non-resident hunters out of the area.

The outfitting lease, situated on the southern end of the Great Bear Rainforest, covers 18,000 square kilometers, or roughly 4.5 million acres. Raincoast purchased the tenure from the estate of a legitimate hunting outfitter who recently passed away, a source with the pro-hunting group, Hunters for B.C. tells Field & Stream.

Massive Fundraising Effort

It reportedly cost the organization $1.92 million to acquire the tenure, which comes with the infrastructure needed to run a successful guiding outfit—like cabins, base lodges, boats, planes, and ATVs. According to Raincoast’s website, they received 700 individual contributions from around the world that allowed them to make the acquisition, including substantial support from a U.S.-based outdoor apparel company.

“We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to you, our amazing donors, for caring enough to give your incredibly generous support to this transformative initiative,” reads a January 4 statement on the Raincoast website attributed to Guide Outfitter Coordinator Brian Falconer. “Last but not least, we want to convey our deep gratitude and appreciation to Patagonia’s Holdfast Collective for providing such extraordinary and timely support to help push this acquisition over the top.”

Scott Ellis is the Executive Director of the Guide Outfitters Association of B.C. He tells F&S that Raincoast’s motives for buying up hunting tenures is simple: They want to curtail legal hunting activities inside the Great Bear Rainforest. “Raincoast claims not to be an anti-hunting organization. But they act like an anti-hunting organization, and they talk like an anti-hunting organization,” Ellis says. “They were behind the closure of the grizzly bear hunt throughout the province in 2017, and they’ve been buying guide territories for 20 years.”

With its recent purchase, Raincoast says it now owns exclusive non-resident guiding rights to six guide territories that comprise 87.5 percent of the 15-million acre Great Bear Rainforest. According to Ellis, B.C.’s 2017 ban on grizzly bear hunting greatly reduced the commercial value of those guide territories in southern B.C. because the area was a popular destination for non-resident grizzly bear hunters. And those foreign hunters made up a substation portion of local guide and outfitter revenue stream.


Prioritizing Bear Viewing Over Bear Hunting

In the absence of grizzly hunting, the popularity of bear viewing has skyrocketed in the Great Bear Rainforest. And Raincoast is working to support local companies that run bear viewing outfits for tourists. “They were very strategic in how they showed First Nations communities how best to generate revenue by viewing bears,” Ellis says. “Whereas hunting bears may be difficult, the viewing is much easier. So they’ve built docs and given boats and given training and all that stuff. The money behind the environmental movement here that Raincoast has access to is overwhelming.”

Falconer has gone on record to say that Raincoast continues to purchase tenures in hopes of keeping non-resident hunters out of the Great Bear Rainforest—particularly in the event that the B.C. government reverses course and reinstates the grizzly bear hunt, which has happened in the past. In doing so, the Falconer says, they’ll not only protect grizzly bears but also safeguard the economic interests of those who draw revenue from grizzly bear viewing operations.

“The behavior changes really radically when these animals are hunted,” Falconer recently said on a B.C.-based news radio program. “In 22 years of taking people to see bears in close proximity, there were places where the bears were hunted, and we would go in and never see them. Within two years of buying out the tenures, there would be 17, 18 grizzlies feeding along the river.”


A Slight of Hand

Though Raincoast’s stated mission is to rid southern B.C. of what it calls “commercial trophy hunting,” the group still claims publicly that they are actively guiding hunters on the six large tenures they now own in the Great Bear Rainforest. This is likely because the B.C. government designed the tenure program with hunting in mind—and ostensibly requires that some form of hunting be carried out by the license holder. In fact the B.C. Wildlife Act, a body of laws that govern hunting and fishing activities throughout the province, says that habitat managers can revoke or cancel tenures that aren’t being used for hunting purposes.

When asked by John Streit of 980 CKNW if he’s worried about any of the Raincoast’s tenures being canceled due to non-hunting use, Falconer said: “We do hunt them. We’re not very successful. We have a very fussy clientele. But we do absolutely comply with the Wildlife Act.”

Ellis calls the strategy a loophole. “That’s how they’re able to tie up these guiding territories,” he says. “In that way, they’re supposedly meeting their obligation for the hunting tenure. Who knows how many of these quote-unquote hunters they actually take out, or if it just exist on paper.”


Travis Hall is the associate news editor for Field & Stream. Originally from southern Indiana, he lived and worked in Yellowstone National Park, along the Carolina coast, and in the southern Appalachian Mountains before moving to his current home in western Montana.

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Originally posted by Spooksar:
They bought a hunting concession but resident hunters can still hunt. The biggest problem is the outfitters are selling out because of the Grizzly bear closures. This is the biggest profit for the outfitters and now they can’t make a living, the article said they started this 2 years ago so the same timeframe as the Grizzly closer. It’s all a well planned assault on hunters.

those groups will find a way to make no hunting is done there in the future even for locals.

quote:

Originally posted by medved:

quote:

Originally posted by Spooksar:
They bought a hunting concession but resident hunters can still hunt. The biggest problem is the outfitters are selling out because of the Grizzly bear closures. This is the biggest profit for the outfitters and now they can’t make a living, the article said they started this 2 years ago so the same timeframe as the Grizzly closer. It’s all a well planned assault on hunters.

those groups will find a way to make no hunting is done there in the future even for locals.

That is their goal unfortunately they are winning in the long run.

quote:

Originally posted by Spooksar:

quote:

Originally posted by medved:

quote:

Originally posted by Spooksar:
They bought a hunting concession but resident hunters can still hunt. The biggest problem is the outfitters are selling out because of the Grizzly bear closures. This is the biggest profit for the outfitters and now they can’t make a living, the article said they started this 2 years ago so the same timeframe as the Grizzly closer. It’s all a well planned assault on hunters.

those groups will find a way to make no hunting is done there in the future even for locals.

That is their goal unfortunately they are winning in the long run.

And " Those" groups have very very deep pockets compared to the resident hunters who complain and a $15.00 Deer or $25.00 Elk-Moose tag !!! As they drive in there Big $$$ UTV-ATV wearing the latest high $$$$ camo Calbeal's gear sipping a $10.00 cup of Starbucks drink