A 2022 poll confirmed that roughly 80% of Washington voters oppose spring bear hunting, including 69% of those in hunting households.
The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission responded to public outcry by banning recreational spring bear hunting in a series of votes in 2021-2022. Yet Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) Director Kelly Susewind, a devout spring bear hunter, is determined to bring it back—defying science, ethics, and public values. His push to restore this cruel hunt is emblematic of the systemic failures that we will be exposing through our Not My WDFW campaign.
While the hunt existed, Washington’s black bears had to run from hunters every month they were not in hibernation except July, including the moment they emerged starving from their dens. Although hunters still kill 1,700-2,200 black bears every year, the spring hunt was especially egregious, because it targeted bears at their most vulnerable and inevitably orphaned nursing cubs, leaving them to certain death.
WDFW provides a respite for most hunted species in the spring. However, it insisted for decades that the spring bear hunt was necessary for “management” reasons. After WDFW leadership was forced to concede in 2021 that they had no evidence or science to support this claim, they nevertheless pushed to continue the hunt as a recreational “opportunity.”
Susewind, in particular, was determined that Washington would remain one of only eight states that allowed spring bear hunting. Paramount to his concerns was preserving one of his own favorite hobbies: Not only is Susewind part of the 8% of Washingtonians who support the hunt; he is also a devout spring bear hunter himself.
After the spring bear hunt was suspended in 2021, he promised that he and his staff would be “working our butts off” to bring it back. Just before the Commission approved a permanent ban in 2022, Susewind resorted to a personal plea, indignant at the thought of waiting until August to kill bears.
“Spring hunting is very different… I can tell you from personal experience, my first game animal was a spring bear 51 years ago, that it is a very different experience,” Susewind said, visibly angry. “Don’t say my opportunity [to kill bears] in the fall replaces my opportunity in the spring. It does not. .…Don’t tell me that it is the same thing, and that if I kill a bear in the fall, it is the same as if I kill a bear in the spring. It’s just not.”
Now, Susewind is pursuing a new tactic to revive spring bear hunting, joining openly with the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, an Ohio-based trophy hunting and gun rights organization, in seeking to oust all remaining Commissioners who voted to ban it.
Bear hunters have been threatening and abusing Commissioners who voted against spring bear hunting for three years, and petitioned to reinstate it dozens of times. If Susewind has his way, their future success is all but assured.
Join us in making clear that neither the director’s hobbies nor values should dictate Washington wildlife policy.
Spring bear hunting is not scientific. It is not ethical. It is not Washington.
