Published: April 20, 2008 01:20 am         

This development will bear some watching

Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources is considering a regulation that would punish people who inadvertently feed bears. (Add this to the reasons I am glad to have moved to the relative sanity of West Virginia.)

If, after having been previously warned by the DNR, you continue to put out corn for the deer and turkeys or have garbage cans or bird feeders (which inadvertently tend to become squirrel feeders), and a bear is attracted to them, you could be subject to a fine of up to $250.

It’s been suggested that people wait until the morning of pickup to put out their garbage and bring in their feeders every night. Right. And they could plant their crops and gardens in movable plots that are suitable for nocturnal towing into the same fortified stockade that houses their dogs and goats and the kids’ playground set. (A fellow who worked in a forestry camp told me one of the most impressive things he’d ever seen was the way a fully-grown Gunther Grizzwell convinces a padlocked dumpster to surrender its goodies.)

If enacted, this would be a variation of the “attractive nuisance” laws that are designed to protect children. For example, a swimming pool is so attractive to youngsters that it in effect becomes a nuisance. Kids are unable to appreciate the risk involved and can’t help themselves, so they sneak in and go swimming. (Yes, my friends and I did it.) If something bad happens, the pool owner can be held legally responsible.

Therefore, it is the duty of the pool owner to make the pool inaccessible to children — which, like an existing legal prohibition against deliberately feeding bears, makes sense.

The proposed DNR regulation would make your bird/squirrel feeder a potential attractive nuisance where bears are concerned.

For as much as you may consider the bear an unattractive nuisance, he cannot appreciate the legal concepts of trespass, malicious destruction of property and theft. He can’t fight the feeling, so he wants to open your garbage can and feast on the contents as much as that little kid wants to swim in your pool.

In our well-meaning efforts to solve a problem, we too often address its symptoms instead of the actual cause.

One example of this is our ongoing effort to curb crime and violence by preventing law-abiding citizens from owning firearms. It’s easier, cheaper and a better TV news segment to declare a gun amnesty in which the police pay people $25 for every firearm they turn in, no questions asked (one always wonders how many of them were stolen), than to take on the social and economic conditions that breed crime.

Another example is the idea of easing the high cost of health care by having the government subsidize it. (Massachusetts is trying this and, according to The Associated Press, has found it hideously expensive and complicated.)

Rather than address the reasons health care costs so much (and risk offending the fat cats who make campaign contributions), legislators find it more feasible to impose enormous taxes on cigarettes. From one side of their mouths, they say the higher taxes will deter people from smoking, and from the other they explain how the revenue from those new taxes will help pay for health care.

Now it is proposed to deal with the growing bear-human conflict by penalizing humans who attract bears by inadvertently feeding them. (You don’t think folks actually want bears prowling around in their yards, do you?)

Maryland’s bears are mostly residents of the western counties and — like many of their human neighbors — financially unable to make campaign contributions. However, unlike Western Maryland’s humans, they have a statewide following in the General Assembly.

That’s because politicians pay the most attention to two types of people: those who give them money, and those who whine the loudest. There’s plenty of whining on behalf of Maryland’s bears.

Bears and humans once coexisted with ease because both populations were smaller and better able to avoid contact. Now, there are too many of both, and they are encroaching on each other.

Maryland tries to control the bear herd with a legal hunting season, but that draws anguished protests from people who in most cases have never even seen a bear in the wild, let alone been confronted by one that destroyed their crops or other property and chased their children or pets. (State Sen. George Edwards became my hero when he proposed rounding up our excess of bears and sending them down east so people there can see what it’s like to contend with them.)

The bears-are-people-too crowd says the bear-human conflict is all the humans’ fault, and they don’t want us to feed the bears anything — regardless of whether it’s birdseed, garbage or 150 grains of copper-jacketed lead.

Listen up, my innocent little friends, bears ain’t people. They can quickly turn into al-Qaeda with fur.

A year or so ago, an area family was terrorized by a rabid bear that stormed their house and attacked a room air conditioner.

“It’s a good thing none of us were in the yard,” said the lady of the house, “or you’d have dead people up here.” The man of the house shot and wounded the bear and drove it off. He was found to have acted in self-defense.

Even though I can’t imagine that the state of Maryland would prosecute someone for inadvertently feeding an appliance to a bear, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.