Baiting is a common-sense approach to humane bear hunting. It’s effective and necessary to control the population. It brings much-needed dollars into northern Maine. Most importantly, it’s humane.

Without baiting, all hunting will be by “still hunting,” which automatically brings up another catch phrase, “snap shooting,” defined as “shooting quickly and without taking deliberate aim with the sights.”

In our 90-percent-forested state, still hunting involves trying to shoot a bear at 25 yards while it’s running 25 miles an hour, in the 2½ seconds that a hunter has as the bear goes from behind one tree, then a boulder, then the branches of a blowdown. This necessitates snap shooting.

This is inhumane. It will result in a huge number of wounded bears, which will crawl into their dens and suffer horribly before they die. Mainers need to trust our Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and bear biologists and vote “no” on Question 1.

Jack Buckley

Durham

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