Tim Brent was looking for moose in the Yukon Territory when his party spotted a grizzly down at the bottom of a ravine. He clambered down, waiting for the bear to get close, and then took one shot, with a 30 caliber Nosler.
“It was a clean, ethical hunt, 100% legal,” he says. That moment of man versus bear turned into a story that sheds light on the wild dispute over bear hunting in North America, and, perhaps, reveals how fine the lines are between humans, and between humans and beasts.
Brent and his party with Rogue River Outfitters carted the bear out, all 600-700 pounds. The meat will be eaten. The carcass went to a beetle farm, where the skeleton will be cleaned to mount in a museum. The hunt is priced at about $40,000.
After it, Brent, who is the son-in-law of Rogue River’s Jim Shockey, a celebrity hunter, posted a picture on Instagram and Twitter.
Alright folks, here is my Mountain Grizzly! We put an awesome stalk on him but he spotted us at about 75 yards. Instead of taking off he turned and came right at us. It was very easy to tell this boar owned the valley we were hunting in and wasn’t scared of anything! …
That’s when social media hell broke loose against Brent, who is also a former pro ice hockey player for the Toronto Maple Leafs and now a commercial real estate broker in North Carolina. There were death threats, including to Brent’s wife Eva Shockey and their 2-year-old daughter. There were anti-hunting celebrity tweets from Ricky Gervais, Billy Baldwin and Holly Marie Combs. Brent went on NRATV to tell his story, where he was cheered.
The divide between North American hunters and those who object to hunting is deep and nasty when it comes to grizzly bear hunts, and it seems only likely to grow as the bear population multiplies from its current level. There are currently
about 700 bears in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, according to the National Park Service.
A year ago, the federal U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service turned management of the bears over to the states, officially removing them from the endangered species list. Wyoming and Idaho decided to allow a limited grizzly bear hunt; Montana officials are still considering whether to do the same. But last month, a judge ruled in favor of the Humane Society, which wanted the Endangered Species Act protections restored and the hunts blocked.
The fight is far from over, judging by the vitriol around Brent’s photo.
British actor and comedian Ricky Gervais, an animal rights activist or radical, retweeted the picture with a note: “I bet killing this beautiful bear ‘put an awesome stalk on’ Tim too. Gervais is a longtime animal rights advocate who has consistently taken stands against animal cruelty. He’s also disgusted by the idea that someone would enjoy killing an animal. Gervais kicked off a free-for-all against Brent.
Brent reported one threat to Twitter. It read: “We’ll get a Mexican Cartel to put a hit on you and see if you worry about it then.” Twitter responded that the tweet didn’t violate its policies.
As in many debates, social media amplifies the anger, obscuring a more complicated issue underneath. Many biologists say that the evidence supports limited bear hunting to manage the population. The Humane Society says trophy hunting – defined as hunting in which the primary purpose is not food — is not necessary to manage populations.
The Shockeys, and other hunters I’ve written about, are standard-bearers, but the Humane Society points out that some hunting practices are pretty horrible.
“Although grizzly bears are protected from hunting in the lower 48 states – thanks to a September ruling on Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) grizzly bears – black bears are often targeted using some of the most unsporting methods including hounding, where the bear is chased down by packs of dogs, and baiting, where bears are shot over piles of donuts, candy, grease, rotting garbage, corn, fish, meat and other high-calorie foods,” said Samantha Hagio, director, Wildlife Protection, by email.
Brent points out that hunters not only support the bears’ environment with their licenses and fees, but that their approach – when it’s ethical — is arguably the most ethical way to source meat in the meat-eating world. Hunters argue that hunting and killing an animal, and then eating its meat, is more ethical than buying a pack of hamburger in the store. As for the question of killing, Brent says, “I hate that (killing) is all that matters when it’s such a small part of it for people who live an outdoors lifestyle.”
Of all the controversies around hunting, I wondered why grizzly bear hunting seems to bring out the most emotion. They are, after all, predators: A boar will kill its own young to bring a sow back into heat; Brent said bears are known to follow a pregnant moose for miles, and wait till she lies down to give birth, to attack. They can decimate the herbivore population, eating dozens of moose and elk calves a year.
While they are statistically pretty harmless to humans (there are thousands of bear encounters every year from which both bear and human walk away), bears kill people sometimes, a few people every year in North America, based on this Wikipedia list.
Mostly, they are unpredictable and powerful. I saw a young grizzly bear walking up a hillside in Montana once from a few hundred feet away. That bear on its hind legs was proto-human, raised and protected by its mother, and as a young adult a reminder that bears ruled the continent before we arrived.
People won out. They had opposable thumbs and trigger fingers. We also found a way to conquer even the fear of the bears, by turning them into teddies.
Some activists, like Ricky Gervais, act on the principal that animal rights are on the level of – or nearly on the level of — human rights, which is a morally grounded position. I’m curious about whether he’d feel any responsibility if something were to happen to Brent or his wife or daughter.
Leaving aside radicals and activists, and the general horrors of social media, it’s hard to square opposition to hunting with the practice of eating meat. Shouldn’t a meat eater (I’m not one) be much more comfortable with the idea of an elk popper from an animal shot by Brent or his wife than a hamburger from cattle raised in one of the herds I’ve passed in the Midwest, where hundreds of animals stand packed together in dark fields of shit?
This is, in fact, part of what infuriated Brent. In the social media ruckus, Instagram took down his photograph of the grizzly and blurred another of the bloody back strap of a moose. “This is literally the same thing you’d see walking down the aisle in Whole Foods,” he said. “To the people on the other side of the issue, do you eat meat or carry a leather bag? The way that we hunt and the way that we carry ourselves, and the way we eat what we hunt … A lot of times this is far more civil than what a lot of animals go through for those other purposes.”
““It’s dissociation. I really believe that people don’t understand anymore where meat comes from. There’s been too many comments made that suggest that they don’t understand anymore,” he said. “People don’t understand that when they buy a piece of beef, that the cow had to be slaughtered for them to have that piece of meat.”
In fact, maybe one of the biggest ironies is that both Gervais and Brent are moved by the animals’ suffering – one man in the direction of protecting animals, even at high cost, and the other in the direction of honoring the suffering. I understand that not everybody is going tp hunt, but there is a connection to your food. There would be a lot less waste if people understood what that animal suffered for our sustenance.”
