Sierra Club of Florida<\/a> said dozens of its own members, as well as coalition allies, have secured 52 of the available 172 permits.<\/p>\nSierra Club Florida Director Susannah Randolph said they are hopeful the FWC will enforce the law when it comes to monitoring how many bears are taken.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people who approved the hunt were political appointees, that\u2019s why we were calling on Governor DeSantis to step in and stop the hunt,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She said they have heard some chatter online from hunters talking of \u201csettling the score\u201d with the non-hunters.<\/p>\n
She also noted that killing more than one bear would be poaching, which is illegal.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe FWC political appointees have really taken away a lot of the tools for the scientists to actually follow the science and do right for what this species needs to survive for future generations,\u201d Randolph said.<\/p>\n
Jason Howard, a hunter who spoke to WESH in November, talked to the station again this weekend to say he did not have any luck.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t trophy hunt. When I deer hunt, I don\u2019t hunt for antlers. It\u2019s for meat. I enjoy deer meat, wild hog meat, turkey meat and I hope to enjoy bear meat as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Randolph said she is concerned about the future, when the FWC said dog hunting of Florida black bears will be allowed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s extremely cruel, not just to the bears but to the dogs, you lose dogs in the course of bear hunting, but even our U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi prosecuted dog hunters when she was the attorney general for Florida,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2025 WESH via CNN Newsource. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. (WESH) \u2013 Florida\u2019s bear hunt is now underway. Over the next three weeks, and for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8278,30646,42433,28,42432,30,29,4747,23412,42187],"class_list":["post-74692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-bear-hunt","tag-bear-warriors-united","tag-despite-pushback","tag-florida","tag-florida-bear-hunting-returns-after-a-decade","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-fwc","tag-sierra-club","tag-susannah-randolph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}