B.C. bear shooting 'traumatized' boy

An Okanagan mother is calling for changes in the way conservation officers deal with problem bears, saying her son was traumatized when officers shot and killed a bear cub Wednesday.

The shooting of the bear near the family home was a horrible experience for her son Leeum, Alyson Jones told CBC News.

"He was screaming and crying and saying, 'they shot the bear, they shot the bear,'" Jones said. "There was blood everywhere, the bear was falling down the hill … it was just heart-wrenching."  

Leeum, 10, said he was at his computer in his home in Naramata, 10 kilometres north of Penticton, when her heard the shots.

"I heard a big bang and then I ran to the window," he said. "I saw the conservation officers with their big shotguns and then I saw the bear hit the ground and roll down the big steep hill."

Safety a priority

Conservation officers said the cub would not go into traps they had set and had a history of wandering into people's homes — circumstances that necessitated putting the animal down.

"If he's got a history of habituation, a history of being around and has lost his fear of man, we don't relocate the problem," conservation officer Bob Hamilton said.

Jones believes the conservation officers' procedures need to change so that other children aren't harmed.

"It needs to be done differently because [Leeum] is never going to forget that for the rest of his life," she said. "It's something that really, really traumatized him and certainly his opinion of conservation officers is really horrible and it didn't need to be that way."

Public safety is the No. 1 priority, Hamilton said.

An effort is made to warn people in an area where bears are about to be shot, but officers are not required to go door-to-door, he said.

There have been an unusually high number of reports of bears on the southeast shores of Okanagan lake this year, Hamilton said.

"We've had 358 complaints this year," he said. "Last year — the whole of the year — we only had 313. So here we are in June and we've already passed last year's stats."