The black bear population in Connecticut has gotten so large and aggressive, particularly in Litchfield and northwest Hartford counties, that one state legislator has proposed a bear-hunting lottery system.
State Rep. Karen Reddington-Hughes, R-Woodbury, has introduced the lottery bill, which would be overseen by the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Other proposals have been made in past sessions to allow bear hunting, but have not been successful.
“As far as the limiting of numbers, this is not to eradicate black bears or to throw them into extinction,” she said of the lottery bill. “This is a public safety issue.”
Reddington-Hughes said a similar proposal was made in 2015.
While there have been no fatal attacks in the state, a 10-year-old boy in Morris was attacked by a bear in October. Reddington-Hughes said the boy’s mother said he was traumatized after suffering bites on his leg and claw marks on his back.
Though his grandfather helped him get free of the bear, the animal returned for him, Reddington-Hughes said. A neighbor helped free the boy. The bear, which tested negative for rabies, was euthanized.
“The attack on the 10-year-old was, I think, a disturbing illustration of what happens when we do nothing,” she said. “It was years of not doing anything, and that is basically the unintended consequence of that.”
In West Hartford last summer, a resident walked into his kitchen and got what he said was the shock of his life. An adult black bear was helping himself to some marshmallows and crackers left out on the kitchen counter.
The man grabbed a chair to put between him and the animal. He eventually got the bear out through the front door by screaming — after the bear ate an entire bag of marshmallows. But what happened next was even more alarming for the resident: The bear came back the next day and ripped a screen trying to get inside.
Also last summer, a bear caught breaking into multiple homes in Canton was euthanized by DEEP. For more than a week, Canton neighbors said the mama bear with four cubs entered home after home, even making multiple break-ins into the same homes.
Traditional advice to scare bears away no longer work, Reddington-Hughes said. “They’re no longer afraid of human beings. It used to be that people would say, well, make loud noises, clanging pots, do something to distract them and they will leave and that is no longer the case.”
Now she said, people put out bird seed and other food for bears and take videos of them in their yards. Efforts to reduce those practices have not worked, she said.
Reddington-Hughes said there were 2,000 insurance claims in 2021 for damage from bears.
There are 1,000 to 1,200 black bears in Connecticut, according to Jenny Dickson, director of DEEP’s Wildlife Division.
“But we know that our cub success rate is very high,” she said. “So a lot of cubs are surviving to adulthood. Our female reproductive rate is very high. So they’re eating well. They’re getting a lot of good food. The cubs are surviving that first year pretty effectively. And that means the population grows pretty quickly.”
DEEP takes the position that it would welcome a limited bear hunt in the state. Commissioner Katie Dykes repeated the stance during her re-nomination hearing last week.
“Certainly there are a number of different ways to go about a bear hunt proposal,” Dickson said. “A lottery is one of them. In general, that system can work well depending on the structure you put in place around it. … It’s one option for how you could do that, absolutely.”
“I think what’s really concerning most of us right now are the numbers of human conflicts because that’s a number that has been steadily increasing over the last seven years,” Dickson said. “And probably most alarming is the number of home entries we’ve had.”
In 2022, there were “nearly 70 home entries, and that’s just an amazing number,” she said. “When you think that a few years ago, I thought we were at a high and we had a little over 40.”
The problem, Dickson said, is “we’re seeing a number of bears that are getting really comfortable around homes and around people. They don’t think twice about that fear that they’d normally would have for people. … They’re moving on from the typical garbage cans and bird feeders to finding enticing smell coming from a house and then actually figuring out how to get into the house.”
Once in the house, “They’ve gotten into refrigerators. They’ve ripped kitchens apart. They’ve walked through houses. You name it, they’ve done it,” she said.
While bears are most populous in Litchfield and Hartford counties, they have been seen all over the state, Dickson said.
“Where it becomes more challenging is in some of the places where bears have been getting those free meals for a long time, because now they’ve essentially become trained that people equals food equals a good place to be and that’s when things get dangerous,” she said.
One tactic DEEP uses is to trap the bears in large live traps, as big as “culverts you put under your driveway or under a roadway,” then “scare them a lot,” Dickson said.
“And then we let them go and usually they run pretty fast when we open the door,” she said.
