February 14, 2014,
Dear Readers,
Tomorrow is a day I have been waiting to come for a long, long time, 12 years to be exact! A Rally to protest the Trophy Killing of BC’s beautiful iconic bears for their heads, paws and perhaps hides will happen on the steps of the Legislature in Victoria at 2pm. The rally promises to be the largest one of it’s kind in BC and will represent the ‘silent’ marjority! It has been organized by Chelsea Turner, a 22 year old, committed and passionate woman. She grew up among bears in BC’s wilderness. Her parents are BC filmmakers who, over many years, have documented Canada’s wilderness and wildlife in a spectacular fashion.
Thank you Chelsea! And I thank your parents for instilling in you a love for nature and a passion to protect it!
The SaveBCBears rally comes before the start of the Spring season of the Trophy Bear ‘Harvest’ on April 1st and in it’s newly expanded version. Mother bears with tiny 2 to 5 month old cubs will be lost to their forest home forever due to mistaken identity. Mothers are regularly killed as males because they hide their cubs when there is the slightest hint of a threat in the area. The cubs are instructed to hide as she tries to avert unwanted attention to them. When the mother is killed or badly injured and can not return to her cubs they will wait until hunger or fear or both takes hold and then they will cry loudly, sounding much like a newborn human baby, with no one to comfort or feed them. Every Spring I always pray that orphan cubs will die quickly, even if it is at the hands of a human or another animal. This tragic untold story of lost cubs during the Spring ‘hunting’ season continues on unabated in BC and wherever there are spring hunts, this too one day must end!
Of course also the biggest and best bears and even young, juvenile bears will be taken, or atleast their heads and maybe paws and hides? Photo ops will happen or course but most times the meat and carcass of the animal will lie and rot where the bear took it’s last breath.
On Saturday the people of this province who love our wilderness and love that we still have bears in the woods are uniting and taking a stand to ‘say’ NO MORE senseless trophy killing of these amazing sentient beings. We know real hunters don’t kill just for a photo op or a trophy they eat what they kill. That is the kind of hunting most people are able to understand or atleat tolerate but not this other past-time, this make-believe so called ‘hunting’…this is of someone’s creation for profit or fun or both? Not sure how it began not so many decades ago now but it must stop? This killing ‘harvest’ is beyond justification, beyond a civil society’s moral code. Our BC government has to stop pandering to a very small, segment of the hunting community. To add insult to injury this Spring, as the government re-opens four regions in the interior to grizzly harvesting, they are also considering extending some of the black bear hunts by 2 weeks, to June 30. This insanity must stop and tomorrow is as good a place to start as anywhere! Thank you Chelsea and all the many, many helpers behind the scenes and the very special guest speakers that speak for us all!
Sincerely,
Barbara Murray Nanoose Bay Hometown: Prince George
