Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Spent time at a Bear check station this AM

If its legal not much you can say about it. Dead is dead regardless of what age the person pulling the trigger on it is.
In TN a bear has to weigh a min of 75 lbs whole or field dressed, and sows with cubs(75lbs or less) still in tow are off limits.

Wow. Those little cubs were a long way form home!

None of my business what someone else does as long as it's legal although I wouldn't.
I do shoot a fawn for meat every year though.
Kinda hypocritical,,, huh. You don't suppose I'm actually a Democrat, do ya?

Huh,... your avatar does resemble a democrat some what.... <G>

Yep...I don't shoot cubs, just my choice. But if it is legal, what a hunter legally does is his prerogative.

If it's legal and the biologist are looking to kill X number of cubs sounds more like a social issue than a biological one. For years/decades it was hard to get hunters to kill does even tho they were run over with 50-75 pound adult deer. Finally they broke thru that one.

But we really don't have legal bear here to begin with so I dunno. They killed one here last year even tho there's no season and are protected. It had come over from the LA population that is also protected now. Was legal when I was younger.

I thought long and hard about this.

And I still don't care.



Travis

Sorry, wrong thread. Having issues with the fire logging me out.

Again, sorry off topic by a bunch.

That is because you are brilliant, others aren't.

Too many bears and a 4 day season. Brilliant.

Oregon season runs from August 1 to Dec. 31. No dogs, no bait. Just hunt them on their own terms. Works fine.

Yes, 4 days is not enough to harvest enough bears to keep the population stable. But it's not actually a 4-day season. It's 4 days when you can hunt nothing else. There are more days when it's open to archery. And they've been opening the season to overlap with firearms deer season is several areas. So we mislead when we talk about a "4-day season." It's actually quite a bit more than that.

They have ruled out hunting with dogs because there is too much private property in PA, and it's broken up into relatively small parcels. They have also ruled out spring hunting and hunting over bait. Spot and stalk, what you refer to as hunting them "on their own terms," is not effective in Pennsylvania terrain.

Incidentally, it used to be a 3-day season, opening on Monday of Thanksgiving week, but such a small window is very much subject to adverse weather conditions. Hard rain, for example, will keep hunters out of the woods waiting for a break in the rain. Heavy snow has a similar effect, as well as reducing visibility and limiting bear movement. So it was expanded to 4 days, opening the previous Saturday in an effort to get more hunters into the woods. Then they added archery days and further expanded the season to overlap with firearms deer season in areas where the bear population is the highest. Obviously, the PA Game Commission has not perfected this if the population is still growing.

Conditions on opening day of the main firearms bear season this year (yesterday) were excellent. The snow wasn't too deep, and it had melted/dropped from the trees so visibility was excellent in most places. Temperatures are rising, and the snow is melting fast. There may not be any snow by tomorrow except at higher elevations. That's why opening day Saturday weather conditions are critical.

Steve.

I've shot every bear I've seen.

I passed up 13 different bears in Idaho one spring. Passed up another 6 or 7 in the fall before I got about a 270lb Brown Phase Black with a Blond Streak Down its back. I couldn't pass up that bear.

My father has killed about one every year in the past 5 or 6 years. All of them around 250lbs to 400lbs. Its easy to try to differentiate a 50lb bear from a 250lb bear. But I have seen some 150lbs that look big just because of proportion. That being said, I would never kill a cub. They are just to cute to watch. Some of the best times I have had bear hunting are watching cubs and 2 year old bears playing.

I had a guy bring in a fawn one year just out of spots to check in when I lived back east. He was with his buddies. I apologized to him, and stated that we don't check in dogs here, just deer because of the size of the thing. His buddies that that was hilarious, he not so much.

me and my boys were out saturday. saw lots of bear poop but no bears. i'm not even sure if i would pull the trigger on even a big bear anymore. i wanted my son to get a chance but told him "no cubs". it just does not seem right to me to shoot cubs. but to each his own.