I live in London and around this time last year, we had an incident where the local police had to kill a young male black bear that had wandered into town. What an uproar there was over that one! And I do remember thinking at the time "If they hadn't and a child had been injured how loud would the uproar have been then?" London is not exactly in the middle of bear country, in fact I believe I recall hearing that they had speculated that he had wandered down from the Bruce Pennisula which has to be 200km away. While this is the first instance that I'm aware of where a bear was spotted in London, I do know that there have been reports of them in some of the smaller towns around here.
Now, I'm neither a hunter nor a wildlife expert but it seems to me that if we are having incidences, increasing incidences at that, of bears wandering into populated areas that are away from their usual natural habitats, something must be out of balance somewhere. This is a bad situation for both the people and for the bears.
I'd support a return of the regulated hunt for practical purposes. To my way of thinking, hunting is and should be practical. (I personally detest trophy hunting, killing for sport is, in my humble opinion, wrong.) But hunting for the purpose of acquiring meat and skins is far more natural than the factory farmed meats that turn up in the grocery stores.
