The Southern Highland Reader

CHARLOTTE–The Charlotte Observer reports that two Cullowhee area men were sentenced to federal prison Monday for “… attempting to transport, buy or sell an American black bear”.

Bobby Allen Gibson, 24, and Steven Louis Broom, 31, were charged in July of last year.

Both will spend ten months in prison, a year on federal parole and perform 100 hours of community service. Their punishment also includes banishment from federal lands, revocation of hunting and fishing privileges, and, in Broom’s case the revocation of the right to own a dog of any kind.

The Observer story is here.

Asheville Citizen-Times story here.

REGIONAL–The Southern Appalachian Bear Study Group, a group of biologists from Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia who study black bear populations, think that the current population of bears across the Southern Appalachians is the highest on record.

An excerpt from Morgan Simmons’ story in the Knoxville News Sentinel:

The latest UT studies put the black bear population in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at around 1,500, or about two bears for every square mile of the park.

The number of bears taken by legal hunting in Tennessee has increased dramatically since 1982, when the harvest was only 21 bears. In 1997, hunters harvested a record 370 bears. Many biologists thought the population had peaked that year, but then came the 2008-09 hunting season, when Tennessee hunters harvested 446 black bears for yet another record.

[Research ecologist] Frank Van Manen said that while the region may be biologically capable of supporting even more bears, it’s clear that in some areas, the population has reached its cultural capacity as determined by people’s willingness to tolerate bears visiting their bird feeders or breaking into their homes.

Read the story here.

NATIONAL-The story of pro football star Michael Vick’s incarceration for his involvement in organized dog fighting — and his eventual release and return to the NFL — has excited plenty of comment.

Michael Vick

Some considered it odd that pro ballplayers who have killed others when driving drunk did far less time than Vick.

In today’s Knoxville News Sentinel, though, columnist Ina Hughs takes a look at Vick from a couple of angles, and her main thrust is summed up in this excerpt:

“The second issue this debate raises is a more controversial question: What makes Vick so morally reprehensible?

As Shayne Lee puts it in an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer: It’s true that Americans are fond of dogs, but dogs are animals, and exploiting and killing animals is “as American as Apple iPods.”

In the name of science research, we expose and inject rats and chimps to all sorts of dread illnesses and lethal drugs. We dab mysterious chemicals in their eyes to test our cosmetics, with no clue as to its effect. We make sandwiches out of pigs and slaughter baby cows for scaloppini. We shoot deer for fun and mantel decor.

Fine restaurants drop live lobsters into boiling water.”

Hughs’ point is valid. Sure, dog fighting is ugly. So are a lot of things we take for granted.

This sort of contradiction, or selective outrage, or whatever, is part of what made the recent tempest over Cherokee’s tourist bear pens an eye-roller. Are the bear attractions lowbrow? Sure. Is it a particularly pleasant existence for the bears? No. But if Florida tourists think Cherokee’s pens are the worst thing that happens to black bears in this neck of the woods, they should come back later in the fall.

And if they then argue that the bear shouldn’t be hunted, they should see what’s left of a bear that wanders in front of an 18-wheeler. Bear populations are growing, and they need elbow room.

Read the whole News-Sentinel piece here.

CHEROKEE–Here’s a little dose of surreality, in case your week needs some discombobulation: Bob Barker, former emcee of the game show “The Price is Right”, is badgering Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Principal Chief Michell Hicks, on behalf of PETA, to get rid of caged bear attractions in downtown Cherokee.

Read the story at Ashvegas, but get your visual references right here:

REGIONAL-The mid-August, 2008, attack of an eight year-old boy by a black bear in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park gained predictable media legs, not unlike most stories involving unusually aggressive wildlife.

First, there was the story itself, which got lots of play. Then the follow-up. Then the double-follow up built around a biologist’s conclusion the the bear “had been stalking the child for food”. Then more follow up after the necropsy, with the exciting information that one of the victim’s shoes was inside the bear’s stomach.

What normally gets lost in the race to tell the sensational tale, though, is the word “unusual.”

No question that young Evan Pala of Boca Raton, FL, was lucky to survive the August 11 attack near the Rainbow Falls Trail at the northern edge of the park. He suffered lacerations and puncture wounds from an 86-pound male yearling.

Evan and his father John fought the bear off together and escaped. They were airlifted to a Sevierville, TN, medical facility and released the same night.

The bear, which was aggressive toward Park Rangers when they arrived at the scene, was shot and taken to the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine to determine whether rabies or another physical abnormality might have caused the attack. The bear was not found to be rabid (rabies, emphasizes the National Park Service, has never been documented in a park bear).

Says the National Park Service:

Visitor injuries by bears are uncommon in the Smokies and when they have occurred, were typically minor bites or scratches resulting from a bear trying to obtain human food. Park biologists have documented 7 minor human injuries over the past 10 years, mainly involving bears trying to get at human food and injuring a visitor in the process.

This is the first serious bear-human incident since 2000, when an attack resulted in the death of a local woman who was attacked by a 113 pound female bear and yearling cub.

In the past 108 years, at least 52 people have died by black bear attack in North America, two of them in the southeast, one in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Black Bears live all over the mountains of Western North Carolina, and are central figures in the lore of the Cherokee and later Scots-Irish settlers. Many of the descendants of these settlers still hunt bear each fall during a designated hunting season.

They are relatively common intruders in more remote communities, and are known to occasionally show up in more settled areas. When they come, they’re usually seeking garbage or pet food, and are generally skittish toward humans.

Bears, according to the Park Service, “… may be six feet in length and up to three feet high at the shoulder. During the summer months, a typical male bear weighs approximately 250 pounds while females are generally smaller and weigh less – slightly over 100 pounds. However, bears may double their weight by the fall. Bears over 600 pounds have been documented in the park. Wild bears can live 12-15 years or more. “Panhandler” bears, who have had access to human foods and garbage, have a life expectancy of only half that time.

Bears, like humans, are omnivores. Plant materials such as berries and nuts make up approximately 85% of their diet. Insects and animal carrion provide valuable sources of protein for bears.

Bears have color vision and a keen sense of smell. In addition, they are good tree climbers, can swim very well, and can run 30 miles per hour.”

The 521,086-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park, being off-limits to hunters and developers, is one of the few remaining sanctuaries in the east for black bear. Some 1,500 bear live in the park, in all areas and at all elevations. A blogger for Backpacker Magazine points out that this is one of the highest black bear densities on earth.

Because of the curtailment of poaching and the regulation of hunting, the black bear population, which had shrunk, has rebounded. But as people continue to move into the mountains, bear habitat is destroyed, and another decline in the population is relatively certain.

Also certain is more contact between people and bears.

SYLVA-A pal has a good story from her college days, back in the nineties.

Seems she and some friends, a couple of whom might’ve smoked a little more pot than the optimal amount, took a long weekend road trip from their midwestern school to the nation’s capitol. They wanted to see some tourist sights.

So they drove all night, crashed on somebody’s Washington floor for a couple of hours, and got up early to go see the shining city on the hill.

It occurred to them – slowly – as they were walking up the steps of their first stop, the capitol building, that one of them carried a considerable amount of weed, along with a water pipe, in her backpack. So they had a strategy session, and a foolproof plan was adopted: one of them would stuff a big bag of pot in her bra, and another would disassemble the water pipe and place the pieces in different parts of the same backpack. And then they would go on in.

Later, in the capital building police station, just before he let them go, the chief said “kids, it doesn’t really matter to our department what you do with your spare time. If you want to sit around the house and smoke all the marijuana your hometown has to offer, that’s your business. All things considered, though, it might be best if you didn’t bring it with you to the capitol building.”

It’s one of those great, simple lessons that life offers up every so often, which is why it came to mind a few weeks back, when, buried in a news story about the sentencing of the students who last fall dumped a bear carcass at the entrance to the campus of Western Carolina University, was the news that two of the kids involved were tossed out of school.

For those whose memory of the event is appropriately in line with its actual significance, a refresher:
1. College kids go camping.
2. Near their campsite, they find a smallish black bear carcass, shot through the head dead from a head wound after being struck by a car.
3. College kids spend the night, and go home.
4. Eureka! Wouldn’t it be cool to go back up into the woods, fetch that dead bear, and take it to a few parties?
5. Later, the kids discover that the head wound is oozing on their vehicle. Blech.
6. They grab a nearby campaign sign, which is folded over the top of a wire stand and taped down the sides, and is thereby engineered to fit perfectly over an oozing bear head. Problem solved.
7. It’s an Obama sign.
8. Later, it seems like it might be clever to dump the bear body in the roundabout at the entrance to campus, as a prank.
9. All hell breaks loose, as the action is interpreted as a veiled threat to candidate Obama, the feds become involved, and the national media goes with it. And goes with it. And goes with it.

Kids, we don’t care of you like to hang out with rotting bears in your spare time. That’s your business. All things considered, though, it might be best if …

WCU’s administration, being sensitive to criticism, was very embarrassed. But was the expulsion of these students the best outcome for all parties? When it comes right down to it, the failure to dispose of animal corpses in an appropriate manner is not such a big deal, so it seems as though these students got tossed because they embarrassed the school.

As an alternative, it might’ve been refreshing to hear the school say, in so many words, “helping young people become adults is what we do for a living, so while this incident has been an embarrassing distraction to the school, we look forward to helping our student body — including the students involved — to learn, grow and ultimately, to move on.”

Besides, the football team gave up 69 points to Florida State and most of them are still around.

However, just when it seemed like I might be able to file the capitol steps anecdote away for another year or two, along came one more layer to the story.

Western, a major economic engine for the region, has fired a big bunch of people this spring because of state budget cuts. The atmosphere there has been appropriately tense, all the more so because several shiny buildings are under construction on campus, and because plenty of money continues to be spent on athletics (we know, different “pots of money”, but still). Then, a little more than a week ago, news of some end-of-the-year hijinks among WCU administrators turned up and made our friend’s friend’s dope-between-the-boobs trick look like rocket science.

Seems that some of the institution’s most highly paid administrative minds put together a skit for one of their year end get-togethers. The skit included a good bit of crude sexism — or at least what qualifies as crude amongst faculty members on college campuses. Mm-hm. OK, that’s odd, but it was their get-together, so, so what? First amendment and all that. Well, “so what” is that the higher-ups video-recorded their skit and emailed it to everyone on campus.

Now that’s thinkin’.

So everybody with me now, in your best italicized voices:

Kids, we don’t care if you have dumb skits at your parties. In fact, we’d all like to encourage you to party more often. Pop open a box of Franzia. Loosen up some. Maybe even invite a few of the little people.

All things considered, though, it might be best if …

One of the people who emailed us the video — all anonymously, oddly — wrote this: “People are scared at WCU. Top down administration plus bad economy means pressure put on faculty and staff to do more. We have never had much power under (the current administration) and it is only getting worse.”

BALSAM-This community near the Jackson/Haywood County line at Balsam Gap has a long history, steeped in, among many other things, bear hunting.

The tradition of hunting bears with hounds is as old as the first arrival here of the Scots-Irish, and Balsam, located near the confluence of the Plott Balsam mountains and the Richland Balsams, is adjacent some of the broadest, most rugged expanses of forestland in the region.

It is traditional bear hunting territory.

The hunting of black bear is carefully regulated, though, and as bear populations revive, and as private development concerns continue to encroach on areas that hunters have long considered “theirs”, some hunters have begun to test those regulations.

The NC Wildlife Resources Commission is searching for those responsible for bear poaching recently in the Balsam area, where a bear carcass, minus its head and paws, was recently found dumped alongside a road.

It wasn’t the first such incident.

“To just come and make a trophy out of it leave the rest to rot that’s … wrong isn’t even the word to describe it,” Balsam resident Sonny Bryson told Asheville’s WLOS television.