Chris Powell: Bears become less cute in Conn.

A black bear (the kind that live in New England)

— Photo by Diginatur ]

MANCHESTER, Conn.

As their appearances in Connecticut become more frequent and damaging, bears become less cute and amusing.

According to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, in the last two weeks:

-- A woman sitting in her back yard in Cheshire was attacked by a bear that snuck up on her from behind. She suffered two puncture wounds before managing to scare it away.

-- A man driving a small car on the Route 8 expressway in Torrington struck a bear that ran in front of him, causing the car to crash into a guard rail. The driver was uninjured but the bear was killed and turned out to weigh more than 500 pounds, almost as much as the car.

-- A bear and its cub broke into a car in Winsted, destroying the interior.

-- And residents of a home in Winchester interrupted a bear's attempt to break in.

An official of the environmental agency says Connecticut is "good habitat" for bears and "they are here to stay." 

Why is that? 

It's because while state law now permits killing bears in self-defense or in defense of pets, in other encounters people are just supposed to shoo bears onto a neighbor's property. Bears have no natural predator except man, and state government long has prohibited hunting them. Indeed, Connecticut is the only New England state without a bear-hunting season.

If bears really are "here to stay," they won't be stopped by securing trash cans and barbecue grills and taking down birdfeeders, as the environmental agency and bear lovers urge. There were no trash cans, barbecue grills, and birdfeeders in the forests through which the bears migrated back into Connecticut. Without predators, their population increased naturally and the northern forests couldn't support all of them. 

So now bears will be reproducing in Connecticut until every town has many of them, and the more the state is "good habitat" for bears, the less it will be "good habitat" for people. Only a long hunting season will stop bears, and that won't happen until state legislators are more scared of bears and the harm they increasingly do than they are scared of the bear lovers and apologists.

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Connecticut Inside Investigator, a product of the Yankee Institute, reported the other day that state government has bigger management deficiencies than the supposed lack of diversity that has become Gov. Ned Lamont's new focus.

The news organization said Central Connecticut State University has paid nearly $763,000 to Christopher Dukes, its former director of student conduct, who, the state Supreme Court recently ruled, was wrongly fired in 2018 after police responded to a complaint that he had assaulted his wife at their home. Police arrested him there after a standoff.  

The university seems to have decided that since the director of student conduct handles complaints of abuse and harassment, it wouldn't be right to have a director who was in that kind of trouble himself. But the man denied the charges, they were dropped eventually, and the incident involved conduct off the job, not on the job.

His dismissal went to arbitration, which ordered him rehired. The university appealed to Superior Court, where the arbitration award was vacated and the dismissal upheld. But then the man appealed to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the Superior Court and reinstated the arbitration award with its huge liability in back pay.

Was the university right or wrong to persist with the dismissal though its cause did not involve the employee's job performance and the criminal charges were dropped? There is an argument on both sides, but a risk to due process should have been clear to the university. It might have been better just to transfer him to a position not involving complaints of abuse and harassment. 

In any case state government looks ridiculous here, and if the General Assembly ever comes to think that $763,000 is a lot of money to waste, it should investigate what happened, ascertain what legal advice the university got, and set clear policy so this kind of thing can't happen again. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).

Chris Powell: How much can Connecticut bear?

A black bear, of the only bear species found in New England

Connecticut's bear population, estimated at 800, is growing "exponentially," a newspaper reported the other day. This was a bit hyperbolic, since after 800 the next level in an exponential series is 800 times 800 -- 640,000 -- and the bear population will not be increasing that quickly.

But 640,000 bears in Connecticut will be the inevitable outcome unless the state's largely indifferent policy toward them is radically changed. That policy is simply to advise the public not to feed the animals -- to secure trash cans, outdoor grills and bird feeders and to hope the bears stop breaking into houses and attacking domestic animals. If that policy was accomplishing anything, there wouldn't be 800 bears in the state already and their population wouldn't be growing, "exponentially”"or just fast. So in another 10 years or so this policy is bound to leave most towns with many bears bumping into each other as they are shooed away from one neighborhood to the next.

State government's animal-control people are tiring of anesthetizing tagging and relocating troublesome bears, increasingly inclined to tell frantic callers just to let the animals move along and frighten someone else. But as the bear population grows, the animal-control people may be compelled to do a lot more relocations, even as the remote forests to which the bears are taken fill up with them and make them even more eager to return to less competitive neighborhoods.

The alternative to having bears everywhere is for state government to authorize a bear-hunting season, maybe even paying bounties to hunters. But just musing about hunting bears makes certain wildlife lovers hysterical.

Bears are cute -- at a safe distance anyway. A few may contribute some excitement to Connecticut's ordinarily placid suburban atmosphere. But a dozen or more in every town will not be cute. They will cause perpetual panic and frequent damage and injury.

Connecticut already is full of deer, which are cute too and often a delight to see with their fawns. Bucks, while rarely seen, can be majestic.

But deer are not a delight when they dart in front of cars and get hit, damaging vehicles and injuring their occupants, or when they munch on plantings, gardens, orchards, and farm fields.

So Connecticut has some deer-hunting seasons, and there is little clamor to repeal them. Don't try telling farmers how cute deer are. Having worked so hard to get the earth to produce, farmers can obtain state permits to shoot deer on their property year-round to protect the fruit of their labor.

Enacting a bear-hunting season would eliminate the need for much more hunting in the future and thus be far kinder to the animals in the long run. But does Connecticut have any elected officials with the courage to admit that you can't always be friends equally with people and animals?

It's not just bears. How many coyotes, bobcats, weasels and such does Connecticut really want to endure? Nature is not always warm and cuddly. It often has sharp claws and teeth.

But since Connecticut is not very good at facing up to policy failures and the special interests behind them, dozens of bears in every town may be necessary before the General Assembly and the governor enact something more in the public interest than laissez-bear.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: A sanctuary state for bears

Your suburban neighbor

Nature is and long will remain a great advantage of life in Connecticut. Suburban and rural towns are set in the middle of nature, and the state's small cities are never far away from it. Because of agriculture's decline, the state is more forested than it was a couple of centuries ago, and because state government has amassed so many unfunded liabilities, there won't be much if any economic growth here for decades more. Nature is secure in the state.

But nature is not always benign in Connecticut any more than it is always benign anywhere else. Alligators, deadly snakes and spiders, cougars, and great white sharks are part of nature too and dangerous to civilization. Fortunately Connecticut has few of those but increasingly it has black bears instead.

In the last year in Connecticut bears haven't just knocked down bird feeders. They have broken into houses and injured or killed pets as well as farm animals in their pens. A week ago a bear even attacked a hiker in Southbury.

Bears have been spreading throughout the state from the northwest and have caused consternation even in inner suburbs and cities, prompting environmental police to tranquilize them, tag them, and relocate them to the deep woods.

But soon they come back with their friends and cubs.

So last week the controversy about bear hunting was renewed. Two Republican state senators from the western part of the state, Craig Miner, of Litchfield and Eric Berthel, of Waterbury, called for bear-hunting legislation, perhaps applying only to Litchfield County, where bears seem most numerous, their main point of entry to the state. Animal lovers in the General Assembly and elsewhere promptly renewed their opposition, asserting that bears can be deterred by peaceful methods.

The peaceful deterrence argument is not persuasive, for it concedes a perpetual increase in the bear population and their becoming common everywhere, with Connecticut becoming essentially a "sanctuary state" not just for illegal immigrants but bears as well. Under current policy the state is probably only a few years away from that. Bears are cuter than alligators and Burmese pythons, the bane of South Florida, but there is no good in having such creatures nearby.

A bear-hunting season in Connecticut won't endanger the species but may push bears back toward the north woods, where they belong. It's worth a try.

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Last week Gov. Ned Lamont joined other advocates of the nanny state in celebrating implementation of the new law raising to 21 the age of eligibility for purchasing tobacco products. The rest of Connecticut is supposed to believe that young people don't have older friends to buy them age-restricted contraband.

While the governor and the nanny-staters were celebrating the new tobacco law, Manchester celebrated the inauguration of a 19-year-old member of its Board of Education. The irony of public policy here passed unnoticed -- that the 19-year-old is deemed mature enough to decide how to operate the public schools but not to decide whether to use tobacco or, for that matter, drink alcoholic beverages.

The age of majority will always be arbitrary, a matter of judgment, but to make any sense it has to be consistent. To serve in the military, to vote, and to hold public office at 19 but to be forbidden to purchase tobacco or alcohol is nonsense, but, like so much else in Connecticut, it's the law because it's politically correct nonsense. Mainly it just lets the nanny-staters feel good about themselves.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

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