You made it through Monday and braved the vicious storms of your afternoon commute home. Time to relax and take our one-question personality quiz. Here goes.
You live in a cookie-cutter house in a new subdivision that skirts Florida's gorgeously unkempt wilderness, say near Ocala or a tad inland from Ft. Myers. Overnight, a black bear gets into the garbage can that's sitting in your side yard and steals some table scraps. What do you do?
a) Shoot it! Dern barrrs! (Or tell local and state officials the bears should be shot because they're encroaching on human civilization that was, until a few years ago, black bear habitat.)
or
b) Recognize that perhaps human development is now encroaching on natural black bear habitats, and while you can't control the human population (wouldn't that be nice?), you can implement a more secure means of storing your waste before the garbage truck comes by to pick it up, and encourage your neighbors to do the same.
Now for the results.
If you chose a: You're a jerk; the reason we grind our teeth at night.
If you chose b: Congratulations! You're a decent, reasonable human being!
Instead of spending the next six months alternating between crying and yelling swear words at the wall, we decided to vent our rage to Frank Jackalone, staff director of the Sierra Club's Florida branch.
Jackalone isn't too happy with what's happening either.
"What's going on is, we continue to encroach on the black bear habitat, and more and more people are moving closer to where black bears live," he said. "And so there are some black bears who are raiding people's trash and coming in close proximity to people."
But shoot them, Jackalone said, is "cruel, unnecessary, inhumane and anti-environmental." All residents in the bear country-encroaching exurbs really need to do is secure their garbage.
And it's not like the hunters, who will get to kill one bear apiece, will be hanging out in subdivisions taking aim at whatever has a bear-like outline. They'll take to the woods, miles away from the bears that are actually causing issues.
"It doesn't make any sense, because the hunting is going to be indiscriminate," Jackalone said. "It's going to go after, not nuisance bears but bears in the woods, in the forests. They're targeting the wrong bears, if there are bears that are a problem. They're coming up with the wrong solution …It's killing bears for no good purpose and the only people who benefit are a few hunters who get to enjoy the collection of a bear trophy. It won't solve the problem."
The estimated number of bears is somewhere in the low thousands, but it's been years since there's been an accurate count. So it's hard to know if the bear population is even healthy enough in terms of its numbers to be able to withstand a large number of them getting taken out, not that the people who want to do so give a shit.
But, hey, letting a bunch of people shoot bears is easier than admitting to ourselves we have a problem when it comes to a) breeding too damn much and b) electing officials who let developers turn thousands of acres of pristine land into a crass, plastic suburban paradise.
"The problem is, we're putting too many people into black bear habitat," Jackalone said. "And black bears, of course, if they smell trash, some of them are going to explore and see if they can get a free meal. We've got to make sure that we don't give them easy access to our trash. That's our best solution."
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2015.