Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Hunters will fan out across Florida beginning today as the first sanctioned hunt of black bears in a decade kicks off amid sharply divided public opinion and efforts by humane advocates to cajole — and even pay — sportsmen not to shoot the state’s largest land mammal.

Through a lottery system, state wildlife officials awarded 172 bear tags last month to people with a hunting license, each good for a one-bear “harvest,” the term the state Fish & Wildlife agency uses for a kill.

Some say the hunt, now authorized as an annual event, is overdue given the surge in the species’ numbers. “My perspective on this slowly changed as I witnessed the population boom and the havoc it is causing,” said Ian, a hunter from Volusia County who responded to an O

See Full Page