Today there was an article on the MSN.com website about a black bear cub that was hit by a car and killed in North Carolina. What the responding officer said and was later reported was nothing short of bad.
The officer that spoke to the reporter said, “It was killed straight out”. The person who hit the cub did not stop at the scene or report the incident. The female sow black bear was trying to get her cub off of the roadway and traffic had to be stopped for 20 minutes while the female bear and dead cub were dealt with. This might be the reason the person did not stop at the scene. Maybe the person was afraid to stop with the angry mother bear nearby. Officers on scene had rifles at the ready incase of an incident, so they were afraid also, or at least took precautions to prevent a bad accident. For the officer and reporter both to say and print that statement is nothing short of irresponsible. The bear was not killed “straight out”, this implies that the person did this deliberately and left the scene. This could imply a senseless killing of a bear instead of an accident.
Biologists that were called to the scene said that 15 bears have been accidentally hit in that county already this year, which is about the normal amount of bears hit on the county roadways at this time of year. This is normal! Bears cross the roads and they get hit, just like deer do as well as other animals. Journalists as well as people who don’t regularly deal with wildlife tend to emotionalize the situations instead of just the facts. Journalists need to take more time in understanding what they are writing about. These are the types of things that turn non-hunting people against the hunting community. Maybe I read too much into this statement, but I feel that it is this type of journalism that leads to the destruction of our hunting way of life.
