25 March—The good news for Connecticutie black bears is that they’ve been given a reprieve of sorts for another year. Proposed legislation that would have permitted blood-thirsty lottery winners to hunt black bears in Litchfield County has been aborted in committee. It was pulled from an ursaphobic tranche that will, however, still allow limited (one might say targeted) ursicide when appropriate, for protection of whatever and whomever.

That seems reasonable enough on the surface. But expect lots of crop farmers, among others, to come up with all manner of justification for killing the bedeviled black bears. I could even see farmers holding their own bear-kill lotteries under the table.

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) has been in favor of a bear hunt all along, so don’t expect it to be at all stinting in issuing ursicide permits or in any hurry to enforce or investigate individual instances of ursine slaughter.

Seldom do black bears commit anything more serious than vandalism, the same sort of mischief that wouldn’t even get a human arrested these days. And bears do it only to find food, to sustain their cubs and themselves, never to do harm or simply to have fun. Only people are motivated to do harm.

Keep in mind that bears were here before people and people haven’t been very good to them, to say the least. So Connecticut’s black bears surely are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of food. Perhaps even to reparations . . .