Bear problems in Southeast KY

[John A.]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. And this time, I'm going to start naming names.

In Southeast KY, we have a bear problem.

Politicians like Hal Rogers and and Fish and Game are 100% uninterested in doing anything about it. And believe me, I have written him more than once about it. I always get a reply letter a few months later, basically giving me the fish and game's phone number, who do nothing more than make an appearance.

Sometimes.

That makes for a bad environment for the bears, and a bad environment for the people that are forced to have to deal with them day in and day out.

I think they're hoping that the bottom right corner of the state was more like the Smokey Mountains or something.

They push tourism really hard. And I understand why. It truly is a beautiful place.

But there are also problems with bear over-population.

It is unfortunate that there are more bears than what the ecosystem can sustain and there are so many that their territorial boundaries with other bears is greatly reduced or nonexistent altogether.

And thus why bears constantly are raiding garbage cans and livestock feed and things just so they don't starve to death.

It's part a learned trait because the momma bear shows its' young where the food is.

And then the landowner is having to deal with multi-generational bear problems.

The state wildlife has estimated around 1200 bears in the whole state of KY, but the downfall about estimates, they're only good for who you ask and the reason they're giving that number.

I think the 1200 estimate is extremely low.

And why you have stories like these.

http://www.wymt.com/content/news/Bear-433349473.html

Bear smashes head through kitchen wall
By Connor James |
Posted: Sat 5:47 PM, Jul 08, 2017

JENKINS, Ky. (WYMT) - Early Saturday morning 86-year-old Lois Burke heard loud noises coming from her kitchen. Once she saw where the noise was coming from she instantly called for help.

"She called me and told me to please come down and that she needed help," said Charles Stanley, a friend and neighbor to Burke.

A bear had smelled something in Burke’s house and broke through her wall, although the bear never fully entered her house, the kitchen wall had taken a fair amount of damage. The bear was scared off before doing any more damage to the house.

"I went into the house and got my gun and I walked about a quarter mile to her house and by that time I got within about 20 feet of her house and I shot about 3-4 times,” said Stanley.

Burke said she scared off the bear by banging various pots together.

Jenkins Police Chief, James Stephens, said that this is not his first time dealing with bears, but it was the first time he had seen a bear break through a wall.

"In this instance when I got there the lady stated that the bear had actually come through her wall right above her kitchen stove," said Stephens.

He mentioned that it is a growing problem in the area, but for people to remember that we are sharing the area with the bears.

"This is the bear’s home we are actually encroaching on their home, so people get upset and say ‘why can't they do something with these bears,’ well we're doing what we can but we have to remember this was their home first," said Stephens."
-----------------------------

Now, just to be honest about this, I can't recall ever meeting chief James Stephens. I worked in Jenkins for a couple of years, but after reading the quote I highlighted above, I must say that if he wasn't taken out of context, he really sounds like a complete and total retard. And the Mayor is also a blooming idiot for appointing him as police chief.

1. Bear population went extinct about 100 years ago and with good reason. They're not really good for nothing, and are dangerous and destructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_North_America

Only in the last 25 years or so have bears started coming back to the area (I still am not convinced the state didn't start reintroducing them despite they vehemently say they weren't responsible for it).

2. I'm 100% positive that bear has never made a single payment on that home, insurance premium or property taxes. So I can say with certainty that wasn't the bears home that it tore the kitchen wall out of.

 

[CaddmannQ]

If I want to see live bears, all I have to do is drive up into the Sequoia National Park, because I see at least one up there every time.

But they know better than to come down to Clovis because we will shoot them and skin them.

Or at least nobody has seen a wild bear around here in quite some time.

 

[ripjack13]

Bears are becoming more of a problem up here too. Although I haven't seen one yet, the tracks are unmistakable.

 

[John A.]

Yeah, they are.

As well as the garbage bins turned over several times a day.

 

[MikeD]

I wonder how bad it needs to get before they change their stance on bear hunting and dispatching of nuisance animals.

 

[John A.]

I wonder how bad it needs to get before they change their stance on bear hunting and dispatching of nuisance animals.

The better question is how many people need to be hurt or killed before it happens?

This is a direct result of the bears being a protected species. They open murder investigations when they find a dead bear. I kid you not.

I know a few guys in the next little community over who killed a nuisance bear. Long story short, the guys were arrested and eventually fined $1000 each for restitution to the state to replace the bear (which is another reason why I think the state was responsible for releasing them back in the late 80's or early 90's), and a bunch of other stuff. They even did DNA testing to somehow prove that the bear wasn't killed legally out of state (in Tennessee).

Yet, the states policies are directly responsible for it happening.

The state isn't going to do anything about it, except come down on you with the full force of the law if you "harass" the bears. They can even fine people for unintentionally feeding the bears if they get into your garbage (repeatedly--which is no fault of the person because the garbage company only runs once a week here).

The bears don't have a natural fear of humans because humans aren't "allowed" to do anything to them.

The bears are over-populated. The environment is unable to sustain them all.

Which makes it impossible for the bears to survive without human interaction (eating garbage, livestock, birdfeed, gardens, etc).

Animal rights groups think they need to be protected and should be able to do anything they want to do.

This is one instance of people being sick and tired of being sick and tired.

 

[MikeD]

I am a stickler for the law and for following good hunting ethics. Proper wildlife management and conservation means that sometimes animal numbers need to be kept in check with the available resources.

Black bears trend to be non-violent animals unless threatened. But constant interactions with humans can lead to unpredictable behaviors, esp when the animals become hungry, sick or just become too friendly with humans who are much squishier than they are.

Proper wildlife management means that sometime the numbers need to be controlled, that is a hard reality many people cannot accept. Over competition for food and resources is not healthy for the bear population and is only going to force the bears into more of the human populated areas, as you are experiencing, and have been for some time. It's been a few years since we had a pretty good discussion on this and you were having problems back that appear to have escalated.

I agree it is only a matter of time before people, pets, etc are actually harmed of killed. But this is what happens when anti-hunting animal rights nitwits have to much control over the wildlife management.

We do not live in a Disney movie, nature is cold, heartless and unforgiving. Animals don't think about coexisting with others, offending other animals or the repercussions of enacting harm to others. Those are emotion that we project on them. They think about survival, 24-7.

John I know this is nothing you don't already know, sometime I just need to get it out of my system.

 

[John A.]

Yeah, hoping to get some of it out of my system too.

I have tried writing my elected reps to explain to them that we have a problem. I get the same canned pre-written letter response.

Forget about trying to get the fish and game to get anything done either. After you call and start becoming a thorn in their side, when the heat from their supervisors starts coming down on them, they threaten to start giving everyone in the neighborhood tickets for the bears getting in their garbage to scare people from calling in complaining. (This happened to me).

Pets often take the brunt of attacks. About 5 years ago, a bear got into a stable and mauled the hindquarters of a horse so bad that they had to put it down. This was at a barn less than a 2 minute walk from my old house that I used to play in with my friends and little sister when I was a little kid. We used it for a play-house and secret hideout for years when it sat abandoned.

Not long before I moved into this house, I had to go outside one night when a bear was trying to fight my (chained) dog. It ran off towards the neighbors house was all that saved it because I was afraid that I would miss at 2AM and hit my neighbors house while half asleep and jarred awake in a panic. Thankfully my dog wasn't hurt and I made it outside before they locked up. But I'm not going to have my dog or kids or family killed or hurt. I don't care what anyone thinks or does about it.

Bears get territorial with other bears. That's how their nature is. And when they get used to eating out of your garbage, eventually they get territorial over you being there too.

I've had them charge and shake their head and growl and snarl at me from a distance in my own yard because I popped around the corner of my house without knowing one was humped over in my garbage bin.

I had to keep a pistol on my hip so my kids could play outside in my own yard for God's sake.

The state doesn't hardly ever even relocate problem bears anymore. At least not in any meaningful numbers. And when they do, they just take and drop it off somewhere else to be someone elses problem for a while. That doesn't solve anything. After getting pooped on for so long, it doesn't matter how you try to shine it, at the end of the day, it's still a turd.

 

[CaddmannQ]

Poison them?

 

[John A.]

I wouldn't know how to do it.

I was so desperate there at one point that I poured an entire GALLON of ammonia in my trash cans hoping that it would deter them from getting in it and scare them away.

I mean, you had to physically hold your breath when you got near the garbage bin.

The bears completely ignored it. Ate like it was 1999.

Bleach, same result.

Pepper spray.

Nothing but adding some hot sauce to the main course.

 

[CaddmannQ]

Well I would hate to counsel anyone to do anything illegal but I imagine if you took a lump of Stern's Electro-paste and froze it inside of a frozen dough ball (and put that inside something that your dog is not likely to want to eat but the bear will simply gobble.)

If he gobbles that he won't be able to puke it up before it burns through the lining of the stomach and intestines and he bleeds out internally. Having ready water to drink accelerates the process.

Otherwise I think you need a giant shark cage to live in or a pet gorilla. I wouldn't want to live in a place where bears were roaming through my backyard and I wasn't allowed to defend myself against them.

My grandpa had full size iron strap bear traps in his basement when I was a kid. Wouldn't bother me a minute to snap one of them off on a bear.

 

[MikeD]

My gf's brother dumped a gallon of amonia around his deer blind one year. I thought he was crazy but he bagged a buck.

 

[John A.]

That's amazing.

I was hoping the ammonia would discourage them considering their sense of smell is supposed to be better than a bloodhound.

Nope.

They ate it anyway. Didn't seem to bother them in the least.

The bears may not have minded, but I bet my garbage man was seriously ticked off.

 

[Pawpaw]

You might try Pine-Sol. It worked for us to keep cats out of the garbage when I was stationed in Athens.

 

[CaddmannQ]

Well I you can forget everything that I wrote above. It appears that you can't buy Stearn's Electricpaste anymore as apparently it is too toxic for consumers to own.

It's really nasty stuff. Like eating a little phosphorus flare. My great-grandma used to keep it for rats or gophers etc. Absolutely deadly.

Anyhow, on further reflection, if I have to deal with the problem I would probably get more, bigger, and noisier dogs. I like dogs a lot more than I like bears. I can't imagine a bear taking on a pack of howling dogs as long as there are easier pickings (on down the road) to be had.

I believe that God put Bears on this Earth for us to make large rugs and dog food out of. Every animal on this Earth has a purpose if you know what to do with it. Bears were given to us and they are ours. They do not belong to themselves, they don't have Immortal Souls, they are not reincarnated humans, they do not have their own rights, and like all animals they were given as our Dominion. They were given as a part of this Earth.

Government has no right to take them away without our approval, and clearly with California we have a precedent for "rights that you may not sign away."

Now if the state suddenly says these animals have rights, even the rights to exist, I say complete BS. They are a natural resource of this Earth and they are here for our use, entertainment, food, fur, or whatever purpose we see fit under heaven.

It's easy to take this to its logical conclusion because everyone has seen Jurassic Park.

If packs of dinosaurs were roaming here, we would go out and shoot all them dead; because they are the most dangerous creatures imaginable. On the scale of dangerous, a hungry bear is only a couple notches down from a live dinosaur.

Any kind of vinyl, like vinyl insulation on a wire, will attract animals to chew on it, because one of the ingredients is uric acid. This is why the ammonia doesn't faze them. To them it more or less smells like urine. I wouldn't be surprised if many plastic garbage cans have a similar chemical composition which animals can smell easily, and associate with food. The fresher the plastic the more they like it too. The original Naugahyde was particularly attractive to carnivorous mammals from my experience.