Letter to the editor: Don’t glorify bear shooting

Talk about it

I am having a hard time with the celebration of the killing of this 400 pound bear in Finland (Outdoors, “400 pound bear shot in Finland,” Sept. 11). Some of us read the paper to get the local news that affects us and the only effect that this story had was to sadden me.

You show a – formerly – grand bear that has been slaughtered, only after being enticed to a pile of garbage that was dropped in the woods. What is the sense in killing an innocent creature and then acting like some magnificent occurrence has taken place? The old saying “shooting fish in a barrel” comes to mind.

I see no point in the hoopla surrounding this act when all that happened was someone went into the woods with a bucket of slop and then sat in a tree, 20 feet away and merely had the happenstance of this wonderful bear wandering in, to see about a little dinner, before being gunned down.

Another issue with this so-called bear “hunting” is the fact the pregnant females, carrying next year’s cubs, are shot and worse yet, mother bears, with cubs waiting in nearby trees, are killed, leaving their cubs to try to make it through the winter on their own. Bear cubs are born in the den and spend the first year and the following winter with their mothers, unless they’re killed. This gives them a chance to survive, which is greatly diminished without their mother.

This practice is inhumane and should not be celebrated, or even legal.

Elayne Robinson

Finland, Minn.