772lbs Black bear
 

Biggest bear taken in PA this season weighed 772lbs!

http://rackemupblog.com/2013/11/30/7...nd-black-bear/

WOW! Look at the head on that brute!

PA kicks out some very big bear. I have an old Navy buddy that grew up in Galeton, PA. He is a member of a club that has about 15000 acres and they take at least one 500+ lb bear a season. I hunted whitetails with him once and the club photo board was impressive when it came to bear. Mostly they hunt them by conducting drives. I never did a bear hunt there but I'd like to.

NC also kicks out some 600+ lb black bears every season.

That's a hoss of a bear. But, being born and raised in PA, doesn't surprise me at all. We put up a few 700lb bear a year. Remember the 880lb crossbow bear from 2010?

We got a 300 pounder this year.

Was that the bear that was handfed and raised by some guy?

Those eastern black bears spend their lives feasting on crops and limitless acorns. No wonder they get so huge. Very few fish fed coastal blacks in AK ever reach that size and in the Rockies forget about it.

Something like that. It was a wild bear that was killed on State Game Land by legal means. But, it is true that a maintenance worker at the Fernwood Resort used to feed that bear on a regular basis.

That does not make it a tame bear or domestic or a pet. It is a legal game animal and, if anything, a bear that needed to be shot before it killed someone.

I'm not saying that you were going in that direction, just that there was a lot of controversy and some people thought the thing was a pet that was shot in its kennel.

Was he feeding it by hand? Certainly the bear wasn't afraid of humans if he was, and wouldn't use his natural instincts to escape when close to a hunter.

That's why it's illegal to feed any wild animals in Colorado. Not that it stops jerks from doing it anyway.

I don't think he was feeding by hand. He was just throwing food off his deck. Twinkies were mentioned in a couple articles.

The bear was shot in the woods on state hunting land, a good distance away.

So, when that bear saw a hunter he thought Twinkies instead of getting out of there.

Someone should shove Twinkies up that guys butt. No doubt he was some tree hugger.

I doubt it workl quite that way. We have bears that come around the house and eat from people's feeders. These same bears will take off like a bat out of hell if they sense a human in the woods. They are still wild and cunning.

Even in states that allow baiting, bears are still super-skittish and flee from any human scent or sound. I don't think they run up to any humans they see, especially when encountered in the woods.

This was also a crossbow kill. The bear would have been broadside, not coming right for him.

The guy who was doing the feeding was not a hunter. He was just a guy who liked to see bears. I believe he had several compaints from neighbors.

If that bear was not shot by a hunter, it would have eventually been killed by the game commission. I think it was trapped a couple times as a nuisance bear and relocated.

With all the hooplah surrounding that bear (it was all over the news), the game commission did a thorough investigation. Baiting is illegal in PA, so the hunters would have had to have been far away from the twinkie man and they would have also had to been away from the path the bear would have supposedly taken.

Not sure why you're making excuses for Twinkie man, and you have no idea how the bear acted after being fed.

All the bear has to do is hesitate for few seconds to get shot. I never said it was going to run up to every human it saw like a puppy.

I suppose the taxidermist will shellack a Twinkie and shove it in the mouth of the finished mount just to add that touch of realism.

The moral of the story is..............Don't eat Twinkies. They give you a big dead head.

Are you guys speaking out against the hunter? Or the bonehead who was feeding them? If a non-hunting dummy feeds a bear, does that make him off-limits to hunters? If you are hunting on state game land, a 900lb bear walks by, you will pass him up because he may have been fed? There tons of bears that get fed by humans. Can't spare them all.

What do you think about Canada and states where they hunt over bait?

You don't want to know what I think of baiting.

I also never mentioned passing up on the bear. Although I might if I knew it's history.

We have a lot of deer that come into town here. They get fed by the dummies here. I can always tell the ones that have been fed when I run into them later in the mountains. They don't run. They just stand there staring at me. I would never shoot one. I don't need the meat that bad.

How do you shoot the deer that don't just stand there? Only take running shots? :D

Actually, half my shots are running shots. The ones that just stand there don't know i'm there.

The ones i'm talking about that are fed in town stand there while looking at me. No fear.

We don't have animals like that here. Even fed animals are scared of their own shadows where I hunt.

Mule deer are more curious than whitetails.

We have so many "in town" deer around here in the winter that the cops shoot them with their .223s and the meat goes to the feed the hungry programs. It's widely publicized that you shouldn't feed them but people do anyway. The deer attract cougars and the same morons who feed the deer wonder where their poodle went when it disappears from the back yard.

I don't think feeding wildlife has ever had a good outcome.

It's always been one of my pet peeves. You should see me going off on someone I catch feeding wild animals.

The guy who fed him said he found the bear as a cub and basically raised him, though the bear was an "outside" bear, free to come and go as he pleased. He has pictures of himself cuddling with it and said the bear enjoyed sweet things.

Lots of controversy around that bear. People were complaining that the bear was his "pet" and the hunter knew that and shot it anyways. In my opinion, a bear is not a domestic animal. Its not a pet. Its a bear and its fair game. The man should have never been feeding it and the authorities actually cited him for it.

The bear was not skittish of people, which was proven by the photographs of the man hugging and cuddling it. The bear certainly seemed comfortable in the presence of humans.

I was afraid of that.

A fed bear is a dead bear. I had a CO game warden tell me that once. Anytime a bear begins to associate humans with an easy food source it doesn't turn out too well for the bear.

If we are going to assign blame (for a legally harvested game animal), it should rest firmly on the man who fed the bear. You can't assign restrictions to hunters on state hunting land on which bears classify as game animals and which are pets. Maybe the guy should have kept his bear on a leash!!! :D

On another note, this bear had a lip tattoo that indicated he was trapped as a nuisance bear in NEW JERSEY!!! So, this bear that the guy "raised from a cub" had no problems ranging 50+ miles, swimming across the Delaware River, crossing state lines, etc... He was a wide-ranging bear and could have been shot anywhere.

Does the Boone and Crockett club exclude large hand fed animals from listing in the record book ?

Inquiring minds want to know.

No, they don't. There are a lot of black bears in the B&C record book that are shot over bait. This bear was not. If it was shot legally, B&C would recognize it. The PA Game Commission investigated this case thoroughly and found no evidence of foul play.

I would make a distinction between a bear that was habituated to receiving food directly from humans and one that was shot over a bait pile in a remote area.

If B&C recognizes the former as a legitimate fair chase trophy their credibility in my eyes is zero.

Who do you think i've been blaming all this time?


However, if the hunter knew about this animal being a pet. He gets a Twinkie up his butt too.

Ask me if I care what you think?

If this bear ranged 50 miles from where a single man had fed him, and a different man shot the bear in the woods on public hunting ground, several miles from the feeding, how could anyone make a distinction?

What if that same bear was shot in NJ? 50-60 miles away and across the Delaware River? If he was shot in the food-man's backyard, you can make a case.

A re tired game warden in west Virginia goals my cousin and his bear hunting friends that if they shot a bear in a corn field he was going to cite them for baiting. And a mother man in wv got a hearty fine and got jail time for just feeding bears.

I'll bet anything this bear didn't act like a wild bear, and was an easy kill.

Did he have a right to kill it? Yes. Does he get respect from those who know about the bear. Hell no!

I also don't like the fact that state record fish can come.from a farm pound. Where the p public don't have a chance.

Muley Hunter - do you care what I think? :D

In PA, fish caught in private waters do not count as state records.

I think we are starting to split hairs here.
Only the guy who took the shot really knows if this bear behaved like a wild bear or like a fed bear.
That's the nature of hunting. We have no crowd present to boo when we are unethical or to cheer when we do something great. We have only our personal code of ethics and our own conscience.

If this bear walked up like a garbage dump bear and got killed the hunter will know it every time he looks at that head on the wall.

Personally I can't imagine a fed bear fleeing at the first whiff of human scent but I wasn't there.

I was not there either. But, the game commission is very strict about baiting and about feeding bears. They knew the history of this bear and conducted an investigation. I would assume this guy was pretty far from the man's house.

The other thing I can add as a PA bear hunter is this: if I see a bear in the woods, I say "holy crap!!!! There's actually a bear!!!!!". Just seeing a bear is huge. There is no time to decide whether it's a fed bear. You shoot now, or wait another 50 years for lightning to strike again.

Sounds like you guys need to work on your bear hunting skills.

You do know you can call them in like a coyote? You can even use the same calls.

Hunting bears in PA and out west are apples to oranges. Our success percentages range from 2%-3%, and most of those are camps that put on drives with 25 guys.

Our bear season is short and late in the year. Around Thanksgiving. There is no bait, there are no hounds. The bears live in the thickest imaginable cover.

Sure, you could try calling them. You would have to use mouth calls because electronic callers would not be allowed.

We don't have spot and stalk. There is not vast openings. You have laurel tangles you can't even see into. If you have a ton of private land, you could try calling a bear in. But, you're probably somewhere that other hunters are pushing so the bear will be spooked from the get-go.

No bait, or dogs here either. We do have millions of acres of public land timber to hunt, and there lies the problem. Finding a bear in all that land. A bear has the best nose of all the game, and mountain winds swirl a lot.

We do have the whole month of Sept to get it done, but it's in no way an easy hunt. I'll be doing it next year with a muzzleloader.