Originally posted by Rupert There must be a misconception by many like me way down here in the far Southwest that anywhere north of the Canadian border bears are just everywhere? I've always thought of it that way....so I've been wrong?
Bears are everywhere. But you have to remember, a bear may cover 40km a day foraging ( marathon for us.), and each bear protects his own territory. As well, they hear and smell us coming and stay out of sight. Where I live, is heavily hunted. A portion of the 10 million people who live in the greater Toronto area, this is the closest place they can hunt bear, so they come up here in droves. We see bear scat all the time, we see their footprints, occasionally we see then in our yard. But a guy illegally set up a baiting station a mile from our house and 6 bears were shot there. With the wolves and bears, we rarely see them, but we see their scat and track, so we know they are there and they know we are here, they time their walks so they don't bump into us when we are on ours. But to my mind, bringing people from out of the area to shoot the animals that frequent our back yard is criminal. If the locals hunt them for food that's one thing, they've done that for hundreds of years, but guys who drive hundreds of mile just to shoot stuff, that's something else.