Jersey bear hunt includes 89 taken at Wawayanda State Park

Vernon - The weeklong New Jersey bear hunt ended at dusk last Saturday, with 297 bears dying in the early December snow, including 89 in Wawayanda State Park. While Martin McHugh, director of the state’s Division of Fish and Wildlife hailed the hunt as a success, animal rights activists decried it, calling it a needless tragedy that could have been avoided with proper garbage management. “Wawayanda is such a beautiful, peaceful place,” said Roger Gengaro of Ringwood. “Too bad is has to be a scene for killing.” Gengaro had come to Wawayanda to give quiet support to the crowd of some 100 demonstrators who assembled in a park parking lot about 150 feet from the weighing station on Saturday morning to voice their disapproval of the bear hunt. He did not join the demonstration. Park officials said that the protestors were assigned to a designated area so that they could express their views but avoid confrontations with hunters. The air was punctuated with the demonstrators’ cries of “stop the killing,” and “shame, shame, shame,” and “kill the hunt, not the bears.” Earlier this fall, the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance and the Bear Education and Resource Group lost the suit they had jointly filed in the Superior Court of New Jersey Appellate Division in an attempt to halt the bear hunt. “In their focus to move the 2005 Bear Hunt forward, they ... relied upon flawed information to justify their pro-hunt decision,” said Angi Metler, executive director of the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance. Terry Fritzges called on governor-elect to stand by his campaign promise to stop the hunt. She was carrying a red sign bearing a bear-adapted paraphrase of William Blake’s poem “a robin redbreast in a cage/puts all heaven in a rage.” Both Fritzges and Metler had been arrested earlier in the week along with Janet Piszar of Millburn, Theresa M. of East Windsor and Albert Kazenain of Highland Lakes. Police charged Kazenain with disorderly conduct, hunter harassment, obstruction of the administration of the law, resisting arrest and making terroristic threats, and the three others with disorderly conduct, hunter harassment, obstruction of the administration of the law, resisting arrest. According to a police report, Kazenain told the arresting officer that he would “get his Arab friends to hunt him.” The four were taken to Vernon Police Headquarters. No hunters appeared during the demonstration. By the hunt’s end, nine anti-hunt activists had been arrested, including Bear Education and Resource Director Lynda Smith and fellow group member David Stewart. On Saturday, Vernon police reluctantly arrested Smith and Stewart, along with four other activists at Wawayanda State, when they sat down on the parking lot in front of the weighing station and refused to retreat behind the orange mesh barricade as instructed. A Vernon police officer was overheard saying to Smith: “Lynda, I don’t want to do this. You have to go back behind the fence. You are the permit holder and if we arrest you, everyone else will have to leave.” “My arrest ... was a miniscule attempt to let the public know that they do have a voice in state government,” Stewart said, “but when they sit back and do not exercise their rights and allow this senseless killing to go on, they are only allowing the trophy hunting.” Bear hunters purchased a total of 4,434 permits, each of which had a “black bear transportation tag” affixed to it. Hunters were required to attach the tag to any bear they harvested before bringing it to the weigh station. Each permit limited the purchaser to hunting in one of four “bear management zones.” All bear-hunting permit holders had to complete a bear-hunting seminar provided covering the biology of bears, hunting laws and hunting ethics. “We achieved what we wanted to achieve,” said McHugh in a teleconference. The Fish and Wildlife director also mentioned that the greater number of female to male bears harvested indicated an “establishing or growing, population.” “The females taken in the hunt are not pregnant. Females that are pregnant would be in den.” Over the past two years, complaints about bears invading homes and foraging in back yards had grown, and frightened citizens had been calling for the Department of Environmental Protection to come up with a solution. On Nov. 14, department director Bradley Campbell signed off on a comprehensive bear management plan that includes five consecutive years of statewide bear hunts. In 2004, the New Jersey Supreme Court mandated that a black-bear hunt could not take place until a comprehensive management policy was put in place by the Fish and Game Council and approved by the DEP Commissioner. “We’ve taken a conservative approach to reduce the population. As a result of this we should see a reduction in the number of nuisance complaints. After the hunt in 2003, we saw major decline in nuisance-bear complaints.” McHugh also noted that harvesting some bears helped the remaining bears be creating more living space. McHugh said that four or five of the bears shot had been tagged at nuisance-trap sites, another 15 of the bears shot were known to be nuisance bears, and 46 of the bears had been tagged as part of a research program.”” In a press conference on Saturday, McHugh said that future hunts would be in accordance with the comprehensive bear management policy. “We think the policy is a real good integrated policy.” According to a Department of environmental press release, the New Jersey Comprehensive Black Bear Management Policy, which was drafted by the New Jersey Fish and Game Council and approved by DEP Commissioner Bradley M. Campbell on Nov. 14, allows for a bear-hunting season as part of an overall black bear management strategy. “The issue of having a hunt next year will be raised annual with the Fish and Game Council,” McHugh said. “We will be analyzing what happened and what it means during next several months.”