08/13/2025
FWC VOTES UNANIMOUSLY TO KILL FLORIDA'S BLACK BEARS‼
Today, August 13, 2025, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) voted unanimously to move forward with plans for a Florida black bear hunt despite only five of the seven commissioners being present.
In a meeting that appeared carefully choreographed, Commission Chairman Rodney Barreto attempted to recast the agency’s image by highlighting unrelated conservation issues, notably citing Florida’s manatees as a supposed “success story.” This was a glaring deflection given the manatees’ ongoing crisis and mass die-offs in recent years, an issue for which the agency has been widely criticized.
Barreto further sought to imply that the public had requested a bear hunt. However, there is video evidence from the December 2024 meeting in which Commissioner Gary Lester proposed a bear hunt immediately following a Bear Management Plan update. The facts tell a different story.
FWC’s own lead bear biologist, Mike Orlando, stated after presenting the Bear Management Plan update that “no action was needed.” At no point in his most recent presentation did he indicate that a hunt was warranted, that Florida’s bear population was overabundant, that growth rates required slowing, that suitable habitat was insufficient, that bears were starving, or that they posed a significant public safety threat. Instead, Orlando emphasized that securing attractants, particularly through bear-resistant trash cans, is the most effective means of reducing bear-human conflicts. Hunting does not achieve this.
Despite this, several county sheriffs and commissioners spoke in favor of a hunt, citing localized conflicts. Yet, the incontrovertible fact that hunting fails to reduce or eliminate such conflicts was never addressed.
This is a dangerous precedent. When an overwhelming majority of the public is disregarded in favor of special and personal interests and when those entrusted with protecting wildlife distort facts to justify killing them, it erodes both public trust and the integrity of wildlife “management.”
Chairman Barreto closed by posing his own “public” questions rather than allowing actual members of the public to speak freely and receive genuine answers. What followed was a self-congratulatory narrative punctuated by a conservation sales pitch, again returning to manatees as a diversionary talking point.
The lack of transparency, the misrepresentation of science, and the willful dismissal of effective, evidence-based non-lethal solutions are unacceptable. Florida’s wildlife deserves “management” grounded in facts, ethics, science, and the public will, not in orchestrated performances that serve private agendas.
To those who traveled to Havana and spoke on behalf of Florida’s bears, your advocacy was powerful, informed, and deeply appreciated. You represented truth in a room where it was in short supply. This is not over. Stay tuned for calls to action.
Watch the FWC Meeting here: https://thefloridachannel.org/videos/8-13-25-florida-fish-and-wildlife-conservation-commission-part-1/
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