Watered-down bill to address bears in Connecticut passes House

A final, watered-down version of Connecticut’s bear management bill passed the House Friday in a 115-32 vote.

The bill, which invited controversy earlier in the session for a now-scrapped proposal for an annual black bear hunt, includes provisions to allow for the killing of bears in specific self-defense or nuisance circumstances. It also bars the feeding of potentially dangerous wildlife, but lawmakers opted Friday to discard a measure to prohibit unintentional feeding.

The amendment was opposed by lawmakers who felt that it would deplete the effectiveness of the bill by striking language that would have allowed officers to issue infractions to individuals who inadvertently attracted dangerous wildlife by scattering or leaving out unsecured food sources, including birdfeeders.

“The whole idea … was to put the public on notice that not only is it a problem — and a serious problem — when bears are fed intentionally, but it is also a serious problem when they are fed unintentionally,” Rep. Mike Demicco said. “I am quite mystified as to why we would remove that language from the bill.”

Rep. Mary Mushinsky agreed.

“I would predict that we will still have a problem with bears as long as people are allowed to put food in unsecured dumpsters and unsecured trash cans … and bird feeders for that matter,” Mushinsky said. “We are going to deal with bears continuously as long as they have people food easily available.”

The legislation authorizes the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection commissioner to issue permits allowing property owners and lessees to kill wildlife “that threatens or causes damage to agricultural crops, livestock or apiaries,” once nonlethal efforts have been exhausted and a DEEP investigation determines that killing the wildlife is necessary.

It also permits the use of deadly force to kill bears that are, or imminently likely to, inflict “great bodily harm” to a person or pet. Bears entering an occupied building may also be killed.

The bill passed the Senate on May 18  in a 31-3 vote.

Rep. David Michel, who voted against the bear bill, took issue with the self-defense provisions saying, “For some people just seeing a bear is a reasonable threat.”

Rep. Pat Callahan, who said a goat-soap maker recently had “a bear attack one of her goats and take it by the throat and almost kill it,” said the self-defense measure is crucial.

“I don’t want that to happen to a citizen of Connecticut or people’s pets or their livestock. I don’t want them second guessing whether they can defend themselves or their pets or their property. And that’s what this bill does,” Callahan said. “We need to do more about educating the public and, and making sure that those food sources are curtailed. But this is just taking away second guessing to defend what we love. And I do not want to see someone, a human being killed here or anywhere else by a bear in Connecticut. And I think this is a good first step.”

With the state’s black bear population reaching an estimated 1,000 to 1,200, DEEP recorded more than 9,300 bear conflicts between 2020 and 2022, including 67 home invasions and two attacks on humans in the last year.

Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw noted that some of the most high-profile human-bear conflicts occurred in her district of Avon.

“Just in the last month alone, we had a 74-year-old woman who was bit on her arm and her leg. A few days after that, there was a bear inside someone’s home. A few days after that we had a bear inside of a bakery … and then after that it’s two bears at a Memorial Day parade where people are along a parade route,” Kavros DeGraw said. “It’s not a perfect bill, but it is something, and we desperately need something to help us mitigate this issue because at some point somebody is really going to get harmed.”

Rep. Melissa Osborne, and other lawmakers on both sides of the bear debate signaled that this will not be the last bear abatement proposal to pass through the legislature.

“We are going to be back here again, doing this again next year and next year and next year until we have bear management practice that actually reduces bear habituation and reduces human-bear conflict,” Osborne said. “I do hope we get to do it before there is a real tragedy in this state.”