If you say you care about the local economy but you’re not upset by the shooting of brown bears downtown, you’re either lying or not paying attention.
Short of jumping on the back of a killer whale, seeing a brown bear at a close distance is our town’s biggest wildlife thrill. It’s also a license to print money.
Photographers from all over the world travel here each summer with their bazooka lenses pointed at bears eating salmon along the Chilkoot River because people pay a lot of cash for just a photograph of that scene. The value of standing inside the scene is exponentially more. If you doubt that, take a newcomer to town out to Chilkoot on an August evening and watch their reaction.
Folks at McDowell Group have never estimated the cash value of a single, Chilkoot bear to the local economy. They should. It’s likely tens or twenties or thirties of thousands, maybe more.
So why do we continue to literally shoot these cash cows?
Mainly it’s because we lack the political will to enforce on each other a local law prohibiting careless storage of trash and other bear attractants. As has been said a zillion times before on this topic, Haines doesn’t have a bear problem, it has a human problem. A fed bear is a dead bear.
What hurts is the problem has swamped us for decades, despite that we’ve had a solution in our hands for 10 years.
The archives of the Chilkat Valley News are full of accounts of summers when bears were getting into garbage around town. In some years, a half-dozen or more bears were put down.
The first serious argument for public responsibility – instead of bear blame – came in June 1993, when the State of Alaska prosecuted Haines police officer Sam Smith for shooting a small brown bear he had attracted to his property with opened pop cans in his back yard.
Charging a cop with a crime is rare, but the state was apparently frustrated by years of local acceptance of an unacceptable public policy: Allowing people to attract bears, then allowing them to shoot them.
Because Smith was a cop, the state chose just the right case to make its point. The story was reported diligently and prominently. How many bears were saved by those stories is impossible to know, but the message was clear: If the state is willing to prosecute a cop for shooting a bear, it might just prosecute anyone.
In August 1993, the state agreed to drop charges against Smith on two conditions: That the City of Haines establish and follow a written policy on responding to problem bears, including procedures on when officers were permitted to kill them, and that the city council consider drafting an ordinance requiring residents to properly secure garbage and other bear attractants.
Police chief Charlie Fannon expressed resistance to the second part of the agreement, saying that city laws like ones in other Southeast Alaska towns that allow police to cite residents for not securing bear attractants wouldn’t work here.
“Juneau is so restrictive. I think (Haines) would have a hard time adjusting to it. I’m going to need a lot of feedback from a lot of people. If it’s too restrictive, it’s not going to work,” Fannon said, without explaining why he thought it wouldn’t.
Because bears can’t vote, the “bear problem” continued until 2010, when another summer of needless bear kills led the Haines Borough Assembly to adopt its bear nuisance ordinance.
The law, in part, reads:
“Within the Haines townsite area, no owner or person in control of property shall cause or allow the creation or maintenance of a bear attraction nuisance on that property or any adjacent right-of-way. Except as otherwise provided for in this chapter, the property owner and the person in control of the property may both be liable for a violation of this chapter concerning the same unlawful act. The unlawful act involves not only the creation of a bear attraction nuisance but allowing the offense to continue.”
The passage of the local law should have largely resolved this issue, but for one small hitch: It’s never been enforced. No one has ever received a citation for leaving out trash or having an keeping an unsecured freezer out back.
Without enforcement, a law is the same as no law.
Other towns don’t have this same reluctance to use the law in a way that protects the public and protects bears. When Sitka was having a problem with bears last fall, police there handed out 17 tickets in about a week. In Haines, we formed yet another Problem Bear Task Force.
Even after the State of Alaska wrote a death warrant for an incorrigible grizzly sow and her two cubs last week, Haines police chief Heath Scott – in a statement that could only be described as Fannonesque – told the Chilkat Valley News he wouldn’t be stepping up enforcement. In the very same article, the state biologist urged the municipality to increase enforcement.
That’s right. We have a million-dollar police department and a law that’s been on the books for 10 years that might help resolve a chronic problem that’s costing us way too much money and time and we’re still not enforcing that law, even as the problem grows.
The Haines Borough’s Bear Task Force meets at 2 p.m. July 7. If you give a damn, email, write a letter or attend the meeting and ask task force members if they might consider enforcing of a local law written to address this very problem.
You might also send a copy to the Haines Chamber of Commerce, telling them you oppose the literal shooting of our town’s furry, cash cows and that you support measures to stop this senseless slaughter.