Bear Baiting and Bear Hounding — Cruel and Unsporting

In 1996, Massachusetts voters passed the Wildlife Protection Act ballot measure, banning recreational bear baiting and bear hounding, practices widely considered unsporting. Violating fair chase principles, these hunting methods fail to give quarry a fair chance to escape. Bear baiting and hounding also produce negative outcomes for other wildlife and animals, including habituation of bears and suffering among hunting dogs. Contrary to claims from baiting and hounding proponents, banning these methods has not reduced the number of bears harvested. Instead, MassWildlife data shows that since 2000, bear harvest numbers in Massachusetts have been increasing.

Bear Baiting

Bear baiting involves luring bears to a particular location with piles of human food waste such as doughnuts, meat scraps, and grease, and then shooting them while they feed. This can habituate bears to human foods, making them bolder and more likely to come into conflict with humans. Consuming human foods can also be harmful to a bear’s health.

Additionally, bear baiting often takes place in the fall, when bears enter a period known as “hyperphagia,” or excessive eating, in order to prepare for hibernation. Eating calorie-dense foods during this time can result in females giving birth at younger ages and more frequently; cub and sub-adult survival also increases. This grows the bear population, undermining the claim that baiting helps reduce bear numbers.

In sum, bear baiting violates ethical hunting standards, contributes to human-wildlife conflict, and disrupts natural population dynamics by artificially inflating reproduction and survival rates.

Bear Hounding

Bear hounding puts bears, dogs, property rights, and public safety at risk. The method involves using packs of radio- or GPS-collared trailing dogs to remotely track their movement as the dogs chase a bear. When the dogs stop moving and remain in one place, hunters typically go to the location to shoot the cornered bear.

Chased bears may climb a tree to escape or may turn to fight the dogs. During the fray, the dogs may suffer broken bones, punctured lungs, or other serious injuries. Dogs may also chase bears through posted private property and into roadways, where oncoming vehicles can injure or kill dogs or bears. In states where hounding is legal, animal care professionals have reported that dogs are frequently dumped at animal shelters after the hunting season.

Bear hounding does not reduce human-bear conflicts. Dogs cannot target individual “nuisance” bears. Hounds also cannot tell if a female bear has a dependent cub, which can result in the death of a mother and orphaning cubs, who may later die of starvation or predation.