A Leon County judge has rejected a wildlife advocacy group’s bid to stop state officials from carrying out a bear hunt this month that could result in the removal of more than 100 bears from hunting zones around Florida.
Second Judicial Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey made the decision last week to deny a temporary injunction to bar the planned Dec. 6-28 bear-hunting period. The ruling comes in the wake of Bear Warriors United filing a lawsuit in September challenging how the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) approved what the commission has called a “limited, short-term hunt of Florida black bear.”
Dempsey found that the plaintiff’s ability to prevail in the lawsuit based on the merits of the case was unlikely, but Katrina Shadix, executive director for Bear Warriors United, expressed conviction that the arguments presented by the nonprofit group would prevail.
“Although we are disappointed in the ruling not to stop the hunt, we are confident that the facts will ultimately show that the FWC’s decision is not supported by sound conservation principles and science,” Shadix said in an email to the Florida Record. “As shown by the FWC’s own witness, when updating the 2019 Bear Management Plan, the scientists did not recommend a hunt, but that decision was directed by the politicians.”
In a recent motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the FWC said the plaintiff was asking the court to intrude upon the commission’s authority to manage Florida wildlife as outlined in the state constitution.
“This hunt is for the purpose of managing the state’s population of black bears in a manner that enables it to continue to thrive, as it has over the last decade under the commission’s management, while also providing for an appropriate balance between the population of bears and the public,” the FWC said in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
But Shadix pointed to a recent FWC study indicating that the Osceola bear population dropped by about two-thirds over a single decade.
“(This) is indicative of the FWC knowing that bear populations are in trouble and that this trophy killing spree should have never been approved by the governor-appointed FWC commissioners … with five out of seven of those FWC commissioners being developers,” she said.
The FWC, however, warns that a court decision in favor of Bear Warriors United could have a serious impact on wildlife conservation efforts in the years ahead.
“If (the) plaintiff prevails in this action, it is true they would prevent the hunt from occurring, but this ‘success’ could come at the cost of severely limiting the commission’s authority to provide for the conservation of other species in the future,” the FWC said in its motion to dismiss. “It would set a precedent wherein the courts can supplant the judgment of the commission.”
Furthermore, the Second Judicial Circuit Court has upheld the commission’s rules for hunting Florida black bears in 1995 and in 2015 based on the same arguments the FWC has put forward in the current case, the commission argued.
Bear Warriors United’s lawsuit alleged that the commission’s actions did not allow for meaningful public participation in the decision to approve the bear hunt, that the FWC’s executive director was giving excessive discretion to determine the number of bear tags to be purchased and that the commission’s decision was based on “obsolete and stale bear population data.”
The plaintiff has also said evidence will be introduced showing that the decision to approve a bear hunt this year had no basis in sound science.
