The hunting community and wildlife officers have been engaged in an ongoing tug-of-war over the practice of baiting bears to make them easier to hunt.

North Carolina has a bear problem, and wildlife officials hope hunters can help.

The population of black bears has been on the rise for decades — it’s more than doubled in the past 20 years alone — and needs to be reined in, according to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. The obvious solution is getting hunters to hunt more of them. The trick, however, is getting the formula right.

SEE ALSO: The bait battle: paw-lickin’ good

By Katie Reeder • SMN Intern

All Chad Crisp took with him was his Bible as he headed into Elkton Federal Correctional Institute in Ohio last week. For a rural mountain boy who’d never left home, 20 months of federal prison would be a long, hard road.

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• Cast of characters

“I felt that my heart would burst as I hugged him and told him I loved him and everything would be all right and that we would be back soon,” Linda Crisp, his mother, said. “For a mother, her son – no matter how old he is – is still in some ways a child in her eyes, and she wants to always protect him.”

Davey Webb (alias Davey Williams): an agent with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources who first started hunting with the Crisps in the fall of 2010.

By Katie Reeder • SMN Intern

A recurring theme emerged in a congressional oversight hearing last week aimed at shedding light on the questionable tactics and motives of wildlife agencies behind the now-infamous undercover poaching sting known as Operation Something Bruin: where is the line between personal freedoms and governmental oversight?

More than 100 hunters and their supporters packed the historic Haywood County courthouse last week for the latest installment in the ongoing saga over Operation Something Bruin.

Rangers in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park shot a bear Tuesday that they believe is the same one that attacked a teenager sleeping in a hammock.

The tactics of state and federal wildlife officers in a multi-year undercover sting targeting bear hunters continue to come under fire.

By Bill Lea • Guest Columnist

In the article about the bear dogs attacking a camper’s dogs (www.smokymountainnews.com/outdoors/item/14952), Wallace Messer (a bear hunter whose dogs were not involved in the attack) begins by suggesting the blame for the attack should perhaps be placed on the victims — a strategy used time after time by defense attorneys and their defendants pleading innocence. Even if Kadie Anderson’s dogs had growled as a natural reaction to protect their owner — which Kadie vehemently denies happened — that does not justify being attacked by a pack of a dozen dogs. A forest user and her pets’ well-being were still jeopardized. The bear hunting dog owners should be held accountable just like any other dog owner would be in the exact same situation. Why should any small group of dog owners be given special status with a law that protects only them when every other dog owner in the state would be held liable?

Kadie Anderson was packing up camp after a night in the backcountry with her two Australian shepherds when the peace of an autumn forest waking up from a nighttime rain was decisively broken. 

“A pack of hunting dogs came into the camp and attacked my dogs, almost killed my dogs, bit me a couple of times while I was trying to protect them,” recalled Anderson, an Ohio resident who at the time was camping in the Snowbird Wilderness Area in Nantahala National Forest.