Dear Editor:

As someone who cherishes the Maine woods and its wildlife, it saddens me that our state has become the last bastion of trapping, hounding and baiting of bears. (See “Bear baiting referendum returns to ballot this fall” in the Sept. 4 issue.)

Maine already forbids trapping, hounding and baiting deer and moose. But we allow people to trap bears in cruel traps and kill them at point-blank range while their heads are stuffed in a barrel of donuts, or to chase them with packs of frenzied hounds.

Government employees — the very individuals who devised this unfair and inhumane hunting program for bears — defend it and have become leading spokespersons for the campaign to promote baiting and trapping.  

In hindsight, they couldn’t have been more wrong: a decade after voters narrowly rejected an initiative to clean up the sport, allowing baiting and other unfair methods to continue, we have 30 percent more bears — perhaps due to the 7 million pounds of food that bear baiters drop in the woods every year.

It’s time for us to reject the government’s attempt to tell us how to vote.

After voters in Colorado, Oregon and Washington banned these three cruel practices, and defied the wishes of the so-called experts in their states, their bear populations remained stable and human-bear conflicts did not increase.

Their experience confirms what common sense already tells us: responsible wildlife management does not rely on setting out traps and mounds of jelly donuts as a way to kill bears.

Caitlin Hills

Belfast