Article content continued

One case was close to home. The province of British Columbia had long declared the trophy hunting of grizzly bears was sustainable and based on sound science. In the course of a five-year legal battle led by Ecojustice and Raincoast, that assertion was challenged when the B.C. Supreme Court compelled the government to release grizzly hunting data. Using the data on hunter kills, peer-reviewed research by Raincoast and collaborators detected persistent failure by provincial managers to keep grizzly kills below government-set thresholds. After publicly dismissing the concerns, the previous government then announced an expansion of the hunt in some areas, and continued to emphasize the province’s “huge and growing population.” Although this debate persisted for another couple of years, grizzly hunting is now banned in B.C.

The researchers also identified political populations of wolves — perhaps the most politically charged of all wildlife — in the US and Europe. In Sweden, where a strong hunting lobby exists, the country’s Environmental Protection Agency contracted academics to model the consequences of wolf hunting to inform hunting decisions. The agency subsequently removed sections of the report that suggested the wolf population might be smaller than previously thought, while knowingly maintaining a potentially inflated official population estimate.

On Vancouver Island the political populations syndrome has emerged as provincial managers are now proposing an extension of wolf killing season on the Island, which they admit is based on flimsy evidence at best. In fact, the stated rationale for extending the Island’s wolf trapping season is centred on anecdotal sightings and observations of an “increased wolf population and a lack of ungulates (primarily deer).” Anecdotes and guesswork, however, are not scientific data.