black bear

A black bear: New Jersey has far more of them than it has habitat.

(U.S. Fish & Wildlife | Courtesy Photo)

That fatal attack by a black bear in Passaic County should come as a surprise to no one.

Thanks to pressure from the anti-hunting crowd, New Jersey’s bear population has grown far beyond the capacity of our limited forests to support it. Look at a map of the northwest corner of the state and you will see that there are very few areas that aren’t within a few miles of roads and/or development. And most of that is older development, by the way.

The idea that humans are moving into bear country is nonsense. Fifty years ago, when most of those roads and houses already existed, there were almost no bears in the state. The bears moved into human country, not the other way around. And thanks to pressure from the animal activists, the state hasn't been able to schedule enough bear hunts to keep their numbers down.

That makes it inevitable that bears will go into populated areas and therefore lose their fear of humans - as happened in this incident according to this report by James Kleimann and Myles Ma. I've been writing about this since back in the first Christie administration – Christie Whitman, that is. She fell prey to the anti-hunting crowd. Here are a few of those columns for your reading pleasure:

This is from September of 2000 and was headlined "Spare the Bear? Bad Move"

Tuesday, right after the state Fish and Game people voted to call off the bear hunt, I took a drive to Sussex County. I visited a place called Lake Plymouth where the bears were behaving like . . . well, I hate to say this but they were behaving like wild animals. They were attacking dogs, breaking into cars and lunging at nice ladies.

I knocked on a door and spoke with a victim. He showed me where a bear had tried to break into his house. He told me about the impossibility of keeping the bears out of the garbage. Even if you wait until 6 a.m. to put it out, the bears will have breakfast if the garbageman doesn't get there by 6:15.

I headed back to the office. I figured it would take a long time to get from Sussex County to Newark. It took 55 minutes. New Jersey is a small state. I hate to be the one to point this out to all the bear-cuddlers out there, but there's not enough room for bears. People love to refer to the northwest corner of the state as "rural." It's rural only by New Jersey standards. In any other state, it's the suburbs. Beautiful suburbs with lots of woods and farms, but suburbs nonetheless.

Christie Whitman: The first of many governors who failed to address the need to keep bear population down.

When I got back to the office, I hauled out my New Jersey map, the one with Christie Whitman's picture on the cover. One inch equals four miles. The typical black bear has a range up to 40 miles. That's 10 inches. Put a ruler up to the map and you will see that the range of even one bear exceeds the width of all of northwestern Jersey.

This is why bears keep showing up in places like Plainfield and New Brunswick.You know that animal rights activist who keeps showing up on the steps of the Statehouse dressed in a bear costume? On June 3, he was upstaged by an activist of a more authentic sort.

This guy was walking the streets of Trenton just a few miles from the Statehouse. He didn't need a costume.

Here's one bear that won't be raiding the garbage again.

As I was researching these bear facts, the city desk got a call from a guy from Morris County named Vince Gangemi. He had just had a bear encounter. I called him back.

Vince said he was working in his computer room when he heard something at the window.

''I went over to the window," Gangemi said. "The bear's face was about 2 feet away from me. I don't know how long he was out there. Then he started pushing on the glass."

He slammed the door of the room, got the wife and kids into an upstairs bedroom and called the cops. By the time they got there, the bear had left. The screen was destroyed, though.

Gangemi is among the many residents of this part of the state who used to think bears were cute.

''I'll be honest with you," he said. "I really used to think it was kind of cool to see a bear. But it's one thing to see a bear in the woods and another thing to see them in your yard. When I go out and yell at them, they should run away. But they don't run away. They're totally used to humans, and that's the problem. They have no fear of humans. None."

If you're an animal lover, I know what you're thinking: The bears were there first.

Except they weren't. Thirty years ago, the state had only about 60 bears. So the state made a conscious decision to grow some bears.

The state banned hunting. This produced bears. Not the kind of bears they have in Pennsylvania or New York - bears that are afraid humans will shoot them. The state produced bears that know people can't hurt them.

The bear hunt would have solved that. It would have, to coin a phrase, killed two bears with one stone. There would have been fewer of them. And the remaining bears would have learned not to mess with humans. This is called "aversive conditioning," though when the state uses that term it means trapping the bears and pestering them before letting them loose again.

It's not surprising Whitman ended up supporting this solution. This is a classic touchy-feely approach and she is a sucker for all that is touchy-feely. When you think of it, aversive conditioning is just sensitivity training for bears.

I wouldn't mind, except that it costs me money. Turning a perfectly good bear into a furry Freudian costs $1,500 a pop. But turning him into a bearskin rug generates money for the state. The hunters will pay for the privilege.

And then there's the other aspect of the state's plan: Cops are now permitted to shoot bears that threaten humans. Wonderful, but the hunters would have shot them amid the fields and streams. The cops will have to shoot them amid the swing sets and barbecue grills.

This is the classic Whitman boondoggle, combining the two central elements of her reign as governor: indecisiveness and misplaced emotion. And meanwhile, as I've noted before, her state planning people are pushing such horrendous schemes as that 958-unit development in Clinton. That monstrosity will be within spitting distance of the signs at Round Valley Reservoir that warn hikers about the bears.

I'd like to propose an aversive conditioning scheme that I guarantee will work. Relocate all the problem bears to Whitman's 237-acre estate in Oldwick.

The hunt will follow shortly.

Here's another from the same month. It was headlined "Alaska is Bad News for Bears."

A couple of months ago, when New Jersey was locked in a fierce debate over bear behavior, the Associated Press carried a news story out of Alaska. It seems a black bear had harassed a camper. It didn't eat the camper, just pestered him a bit. But they shot the bear anyway because it had become habituated to humans.

I thought of that story in light of the recent decision by our Governor to call off the hunt for black bears in New Jersey. The contrast between the two states is enlightening. Alaska is 77 times as big as New Jersey. The people in Alaska are used to living with bears. They know how to act around them. They even accept the fact that bears are going to kill a few people every year.

Yet even in Alaska, it's national news when a black bear pesters humans.

New Jersey, on the other hand, is so tiny that it could be tucked into a corner of one of Alaska's huge national parks. Yet in New Jersey we routinely let our bears become habituated to humans. Last year, we had 1,659 complaints about bears doing things similar to what that Alaskan bear did. Only a few of them even made the papers.

How can this be? To find out, I called the Alaska paper where that story originated, the Anchorage Daily News. I got the outdoors editor, Craig Medred. He's a man who knows his bears. He had a nasty wrestling match with one 10 years ago, but he still likes them.

''They're intelligent animals. They're fun to watch. They're way cool," he said. "But they're wild animals with serious fangs and claws, and they do have the tools to do some damage."

When an Alaskan bear starts hanging around houses and poking in garbage, the typical Alaskan will first try whacking it a couple times. "If you go out and hit 'em with a shovel, they generally won't get into your garbage," Medred advised me.

But if the bear keeps hanging around, the local game warden will come and shoot it before it can teach other bears to look for food around where humans live.

''You're setting yourself up for a long-range problem if it's acceptable behavior for bears to get into people's garbage," Medred said.

I told him that in New Jersey the animal-rights activists think it's fine to have bears wandering around the yards where children play.

''That would bother me," he said. "There's a well-documented history of black bears targeting people, particularly children. I would be very nervous about habituated black bears and kids."

So would I. I'd say that when you reach that point it's about time to have a bear hunt, like they do in Alaska. Medred says hunting is what makes it possible for bears and humans to coexist in Alaska. The reason is simple: "You reduce the bear population, and the remainder get the idea that humans are dangerous," he said.

Sounds simple to me. If a state is rural enough to have bears, it's rural enough to have a bear hunt. There's no reason humans shouldn't kill bears; the bears themselves do it when they have to compete for turf. "They're not real reserved about eliminating the competition," said Medred.

That's a point that seems to have eluded both our Governor and her newfound friends in the animal-rights community. Their perception, near as I can figure it, is that bears all pal around together like Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo in the cartoons. If you shoot Boo-Boo, they assume, Yogi will be upset. If you shoot Yogi, Boo-Boo will be inconsolable.



This is not the way it works in nature. In real life, if you shoot Boo-Boo, Yogi will be ecstatic. You have given him a present more valuable than a thousand picnic baskets. You have given him Boo- Boo's turf. Similarly if you shoot Yogi, his little buddy will have more room to roam in Jellystone.

That's life. It's tough, but it's infinitely preferable to the horrible fate the animal-rights nuts have in mind for these poor bears. Under the guise of humane treatment, these characters want to do something to the bears that is so inhumane that I can barely type the words without cringing. These animal nuts want to sneak into the bears' dens in winter and - I'm not making this up - neuter them.

Ouch! If I were a bear, I'd prefer to take my chances with the hunters.

Just the other day in Wisconsin a black bear got the jump on a sportsman. The bear started out with a body slam straight out of pro wrestling and was ready to follow that up with an illegal chokehold when the hunter wriggled loose. He ran straight to the nearest emergency room.

It was a bad experience for both bear and hunter. Yet I'd bet the house that both would prefer to relive that scene rather than live the sterile life envisioned by the animal-rights people.

As the saying goes, some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.

Either way, it's better than having someone sneak up on you with a scalpel and no compunctions about hitting below the belt.

This one is from August of 2003, when Jim McGreevey was in office and further pandered to the bear-lovers. It was headlined "The Bears Could Be in a Real Stew"

As soon as I heard about that bear attack up in Wawayanda State Park, I jumped in the car and headed to the scene of the crime. I'll use any excuse to visit Sussex County. I love the mountains, the lakes, the narrow, twisting roads. It's a beautiful place.

It's not a rural place, however. Even in this wooded spot up by the New York state border there is rush-hour traffic. And if you've got rush-hour traffic, you've got a suburb.

But a beautiful suburb nonetheless. Before long, I was at the lakeside home of Joel Schlesinger. I had called Joel because I'd heard he had a $1,000 garbage container. It was an impressive sight, a 300-pound hunk of cast iron. Joel showed me the neat little key system that makes it accessible to garbagemen but not bears.

Protesters at the 2013 bear hunt: They're responsible for the out-of-control bear population in New Jersey.

So his garbage is safe. But he's worried about his kids.

"There are several people in the neighborhood with kids my daughter's age, 6 or 7 years old, and they're scared to death to have their children out playing with bears coming through every day," he said.

When Joel moved to the area from upstate New York 18 years ago, there were no bears.

About 10 years ago, an occasional bear would show up and everyone thought it was neat. Then more appeared and it wasn't so neat anymore.

"Until five years ago, I could just yell and they would run. Then I had to bang pots and pans. Then I got an air horn. Now they don't seem to care. They just look up as if to say, 'You talkin' to me?'"

Joel took me to the scene of the Sunday attack that caused all the commotion. An 18-year-old woman was walking in the park when she came upon a bear. The bear ran toward her and tackled her. She gave it a shot to the snout and it let go. She ran like hell.

That's the story the state Department of Environmental Protection is telling. But Susan Kehoe, an anti-hunting activist who lives not far from Joel, has her doubts.

"It's not an attack," Kehoe said when I phoned her. "The whole story is fishy. I don't know if it happened."

The McGreevey administration, which is notoriously tight with information, decided not to release the woman's name, thus fueling the conspiracy theorists. The DEP people say her identity can be kept secret under the Open Public Records Act because she is a victim.

Nonsense, said Al McGimpsey, an attorney whose firm represents the New Jersey Press Association. "That provision of the law applies to victims of a crime," McGimpsey told me. "Last time I heard, a bear can't be arrested."

Actually, the state people seemed determined to do just that. They had set out a trap on the trail where the attack took place. When Joel and I tried to hike down the trail, a ranger in an SUV told us it was shut. So we hiked down a parallel trail and had a look around. A warning sign at a campsite read, "Encounters with bears usually pose little threat to people but can lead to problems if bears lose their fear of humans."

Lose their fear of humans? How could a bear live in New Jersey and not lose its fear of humans?

Joel has a solution. He pulled from his pocket a bear license that he got in 2000.

"I was at the seminar on bear hunting when they said the hunt was canceled," he said. "Christie wimped out."

He was alluding to the ex-governor. Three years ago, Whitman caved in to pressure from the animal- rights crowd and pushed the Fish and Game Council to cancel the badly needed bear hunt.

The McGreevey people aren't a whole lot more decisive. On Monday, a DEP spokesman called the bear's behavior "predatory." But on Tuesday, DEP head Bradley Campbell called that description "inappropriate." He went on to call the bear's behavior "very aggressive and apparently very predatory."

When the DEP is decisive, it tends to come down on the side of the animal lovers. The DEP has made a habit of issuing summonses to the victims of bear incursions, such as that West Milford man who shot a bear that was growling at his screen door. Joel attended a fund-raiser to help pay the guy's legal fees. Hundreds of people showed up, he said.

Most, no doubt, share Joel's view of the reason for the incident. There are too many bears. Now that most people are bear-proofing their garbage, the animals need a new source of food. If they can't find it at the curb, they'll look in the kitchen.

Bears don't belong in the kitchen. Once a few hundred have been turned into rugs, the remainder will have a lot more room in the woods to look for food.

Speaking of food, when we got back to the house, we sat on the patio to look out at the lake and have a beer. Joel showed me a card he had printed up with a recipe for black bear stew. Bear meat, salt and pepper, carrots, a little red wine: I hadn't eaten all day. My mouth started to water.

This is how the world works. Something dangerous can be turned into something good to eat. There's nothing wrong with a little predatory behavior. It's just a question of who gets to be the predator.

And finally there's this column from December of 2010. In it, I note that the bears have become so habituated to humans that they actually walk across a shooting range during target practice.

It was headlined "Bears at Target Practice? That Should Trigger a Hunt."

On Friday, an appellate court rejected a suit by animal-rights activists to stop the bear hunt scheduled to begin tomorrow. The plaintiffs had argued the state was overestimating the number of human-bear interactions. The judges said that argument was "dubious, at best."

Got that right. And the judges didn't even have the chance to hear about what goes on at the Cherry Ridge Rifle Range.

The range is in the Highland Lakes region of Sussex County. I was up there the other day chatting with some homeowners and hunters about interactions between bears and humans in this, the most densely populated state for both species.

Most such interactions go unreported, the locals say. That included the story I heard from a woman, just moved in from Manhattan, who looked out her kitchen window to find herself eye to eye with a black bear.

But what I heard from John Esteve about the rifle range would convince any rational person that these bears have become just a little too used to humans.

The 65-year-old Esteve runs the Mastodon Ammo and Camo gun shop in Highland Lakes. When I stopped in to see him, he was busy getting hunters ready for the hunt, which will be the first since 2005.

Esteve began by describing the scene he encounters in the morning when he picks up his coffee at the drive-through window of the Dunkin' Donuts on busy Route 23.

"I've never stopped in there without seeing a bear or two hanging around the Dumpster," Esteve said.

I asked him what I thought was an obvious question: Why don't they just lock the Dumpster?

I could tell by Esteve's expression he had deduced I don't live in bear country.

"A deli owner I know tries to keep his Dumpster locked," he explained patiently. "But the bears just peel that lid back like they were opening a can."

Though Esteve is making a killing, as it were, on this bear hunt, even he says the area has way more bears than it needs. When he first moved to the area in the 1970s, he said, the bears were where they belonged -- in the woods. But without a hunt, the bears increased in numbers.

Fish and wildlife technicians (from left) Kim Tinnis and George Garbaravage prepare to weigh a female bear at the Whittingham Wildlife Management Area in 2013. We need more hunts, especially whenever bears hang around houses.

By the late 1980s, they started to show up in neighborhoods.

Back then, he and other locals say, the bears were easily scared away by banging pots and pans. But after a while, even firecrackers didn't faze them.

And now they ignore gunshots. Esteve described being at the local firing range with a number of shooters, all of them wearing ear protection. The bears don't mind the noise, he said.

"They just walk right across the range," he said. "You gotta stop shooting and wait for them to get out of the way."

I suspect Yogi won't be making that boo-boo after the hunt begins. The bears tend to get humbled by a hunt, Esteve said.

Joel Schlesinger agreed. He's a local homeowner and hunter who was showing me around bear country. I first met him in 2003, when I did a column about the $1,000 garbage can he'd bought to keep the bears out of his trash.

It was an impressive device, but too heavy to take along when he moved to a different neighborhood a few years ago. There, the residents rely on a strict schedule to keep the bears out of the garbage: Take the trash from garage to curb at 6:30 a.m. Hope the garbage man arrives by 6:45. Put it out too early and the stuff will be strewn all over the street, as happened to his neighbor last week.

Recently, Schlesinger said, he made the mistake of leaving his garage door open for a few minutes after getting home from work.

"The dogs all started barking, Three bears were in my garage," he said.

Schlesinger grabbed a baseball bat he keeps by the door for such occasions and went

outside.

The bears ran away, with one carrying a bag of garbage in its mouth. It climbed a tree and snorted at him as he cautiously advanced to retrieve the trash.

"As soon as I was able to grab the garbage bag, I heard another thump behind me," he said.

"The other two had gone around behind my back into my garage and got another bag of garbage. I would say they weren't too scared," he said.

I would say so as well. But as of tomorrow, those bears had better learn to duck.