BURNSVILLE, N.C. — A skinny, three-legged black bear had become a fixture at an upscale housing community deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, rummaging through trash cans and playfully ambling along the golf course
After the bear started breaking into homes, once stealing two pies from a kitchen counter, some people had enough. Wildlife advocates scrambled to find a sanctuary for the animal, but time ran out: in August, the bear was shot and killed by management.
That bear’s death in Mountain Air, about 35 miles north of Asheville, has become a flash point for outraged wildlife advocates who say the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission needs to find nonlethal ways to handle so-called nuisance bears.
“When it comes to nuisance bears, the state’s policy is simple: shoot them,” Millie Bowling said. “And that’s just wrong. That needs to change.”
This is the latest controversy surrounding the Wildlife Resources Commission. Wildlife advocates were upset last year when state biologists killed nine penned deer on a homeowner’s property in Randolph County. The commission said the deer were killed because they had to be tested for a fatal disease called chronic wasting, which can’t be done on live animals. But the owner, Wayne Kindley, and supporters said they were outraged.
Wildlife and environmental groups also are angry that the commission allowed overnight hunting of coyotes throughout North Carolina this year, including in the area inhabited by the only wild population of red wolves, one of the world’s most endangered animals. The groups opposed the rule because red wolves resemble coyotes and are hard to tell apart even during the day.
David Cobb, chief of the agency’s Division of Wildlife Management, said the Mountain Air community decided to kill the three-legged bear.
“This was an animal that had caused damage to property multiple times, and the property owners decided they were going to address that issue. And they did,” he said.
But wildlife advocates say the state didn’t do enough to help them relocate the bear.
“The idea of shooting bears should be an absolute last resort,” said Leslie Hayhurst, who lives on Beach Mountain and runs the Genesis Animal Sanctuary.
Some states capture and relocate nuisance bears to remote settings. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department routinely relocates and removes black and grizzly bears as part of normal department operations. But in many states, there’s no place remote enough to relocate them. And the bears seldom stay where they are released and may return to where they were caught.
In North Carolina, the agency can relocate a bear but it’s done on a case-by-case basis, and it usually only involves orphan cubs, Cobb said.
“There are very few places you can put a bear that won’t be in somebody’s backyard,” said Bradley Howard, the agency’s private lands program coordinator.
North Carolina has seen a major resurgence in black bears. A generation ago, their numbers had dwindled because of hunting and development, and the animals were only found in the most remote mountains and coastal swamps.
Now there are about 15,000 black bears in North Carolina. Bear complaints began to increase in the 1990s, primarily in residential areas of western North Carolina where developers began building multimillion-dollar homes in gated communities.
The number of bear complaints has doubled in the past decade — from 277 in 2001 to 671 in 2011, according to the agency.
