Western Canada’s economy is already being gunned down by a bear oil market.

Now a pair of graphic bruin hunting videos is further sinking its stock in a fit of global froth.

Foreign newspapers, particularly those in the UK have picked on the footage, placing Alberta and B.C. in the crosshairs of those whose blood is already up by U.S. dentist Walter Palmer’s slaying of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe last month.

One video, apparently posted on Youtube last year, purports to show a boy and four friends giddily revelling in the shooting of a baited black bear as the Alberta boy celebrates his ninth birthday.

A man, the boy’s Grande Prairie-area outfitter father Greg Sutley, is heard coaching the camo-clad lad from a tree-top platform before the black bear is blasted with a high-powered rifle from a few metres’ range.

The camera then cuts to the five boys who seem to laugh on cue, as if calculated to poke anyone who might find the spectacle disgusting.

They speak of leaving school to a birthday cake, presents, picking up bait at grandpa’s, then heading for the grand birthday finale, heavily armed up a tree.

“We shot one dead,” giggles a boy afterwards.

“And it was amazing...seven more to go,” adds another.

A second video, which the Wildlife Defence Leagueposted on Facebook, captures a grizzly bear’s two minutes of mortal agony as it’s repeatedly shot by hunters, supposedly on a B.C. mountainside.

To the hoots of its killers, the bruin dies while tumbling down a slope, leaving a trail of bloody snow in its wake.

“Horror as Boy, Nine, Shoots Bear For A Birthday Treat,” blared a headline in the UK’s Daily Mirror.

Shouts out Britain’s The Sun newspaper: “Horrifying Footage Show Sick Laughing Mob Shooting Bear to Death.”

Not surprisingly, Sutley wasn’t answering phone calls Friday and Facebook posters attacked him as “cowardly” and “vile."

The public relations optics of posting the birthday party frolic may not be telescopic, said Grande Prairie-area outfitter Paul Johnson, who’s an acquaintance of Greg Sutley.

“I could take you out for 20 days and you won’t find a bear...this is the only way to do it.”

Those in the anti-hunting camp, he says, “have to come and see it being done” to better appreciate it.

But detractors don’t need to head for the hills to be loaded for bear, they can simply mouse-hunt countless hunting videos from the comfort of home.

“Killing anything isn’t nice but when people eat a burger at McDonald’s, they don’t associate it with death,” said Johnson.

With similar hunting footage being normally legal, typical and so abundant, Johnson’s asked if it might be good advertising for his livelihood.

Or is it a black eye for a badly-needed Alberta industry actually firing on all cylinders — tourism?

He doesn’t say.

Meanwhile, the province says it’s investigating the Sutley video, with a Justice ministry spokesman saying the shooting was legal if done on private land with adult supervision.

If it happened on Crown land, the maximum fine in a conviction is $50,000.

bill.kaufmann@sunmedia.ca

on Twitter: @SUNBillKaufmann