The bills before the 122nd legislature pertaining to bear hunting will all have their public hearing Thursday, April 28th at the Augusta Civic Center. The bills are listed below. MFOA is supporting all this legislation and encourages you to do so, but our two specific bills are L.D. 628 “An Act to Amend the Bear Hunting Laws”, which as previously mentioned, is strictly a ban on the use of hounds in bear hunting. The trapping language was inadvertently included and will be removed at the hearing. Our second bill is L.D. 1460 “An Act to Ban Hunting with Traps Except to Protect the Public”, which is five bear trapping bills moved into one piece of legislation. L.D. 314 (ban on bear baiting) will likely be withdrawn by the sponsor (over reaching after the referendum). Our focus is on bear hounding and trapping, which the legislature must look at seriously after the new public awareness and vote on the referendum. From an editorial in the Bangor Daily News two days after the election:  “The results on a proposal to ban baiting, hounding, and trapping bears was 47 percent yes to 53% percent no, a vote much closer than this region might have guessed. Advocates of the ban need only look at Maine’s shifting population to figure out that their time is coming – unless alert lawmakers act sooner. A sensible step would be to separate baiting from trapping and hounding, protect the first and ban the latter two.”  

Not to mention that if the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife had not become involved in the campaign in an unprecedented way, illegally in our mind, we would have won a ban on all three practices. We still can win two of the three, but we need your help. With a strong show of support like many of you did during the referendum we can pass L.D. 628 and L.D. 1460. You active support is needed now. What can you do?

 Bangor Daily News Op-Ed

The reason we have a bear referendum is because killing a black bear in Maine today with the use of bait, hounds and traps is needless animal cruelty and offends ethical hunters.  Shooting an animal while its head is in a bait bucket, having dogs and a bear in vicious fights, having cubs mauled by hounds or shot at bait sites (258 last year), shooting from the base of a tree at a terrified hound treed bear, or walking up to shoot an animal agonizing in pain in a leghold trap or snare is cruel, period.