Is Florida’s Bear Hunt Necessary?

[SecularMotion]

Florida is poised to open a sport hunting season on black bears this Saturday. It's the first such season in 21 years. And as nearly 3,000 recipients of special bear tags ready their rifles, controversy surrounds the occasion.

A handful of other states use hunting seasons to control black bear populations, but conservationists wonder whether it's necessary in Florida. The influx of people to the Sunshine State has already made the habitat for the iconic Florida panther so fragmented that the big cat’s prospects for survival are bleak.

“In a state that has seen such explosive human population growth, the bisection of so much habitat means that any wide-ranging apex predator is going to have difficulty making a living in that matrix of development,” says Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States.

Yet in Florida—the third most populous state in the nation, with 20 million residents—bear numbers over the last few decades have surged along with the human population.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151023-black-bear-hunt-florida-animals-conservation/

Updated Sunday at 9:40 p.m. A total of 295 bears were reported killed in the first two days of the hunt. That's close to the number officials hoped to cull from Florida's estimated population of 3,000 bears. The remaining four days of the hunt have been called off.