KINGWOOD, W.Va. – It’s a stressful time right now amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Places are closing every day because of the virus, however there’s always the escape to the outdoors and West Virginians are lucky to have an abundance of public and private lands to explore. The state is an outdoor sportsman’s haven.
However, even with that escape, what happens if you’re limited to one chunk of acreage for your favorite activity and now that’s in danger? For 14-year-old Chloe Kalbaugh, her love of bear hunting is at risk and it’s not because of the COVID-19 pandemic: It’s because of a Division of Natural Resources proposal.
“I was upset and mad because that’s the only place I have,” Kalbaugh said. “Now it could be taken away.”
“She was on a warpath,” said Kalbaugh’s mother Stephanie Morris. “It’s what she lives for, it’s her sport. This is what she’s come to love and her passion for her dogs is greater than what I’d say [her stepfather’s] is.”
The change that’s causing such a hubbub in Preston County is a prohibition of hunting bear with hounds west of W.Va. 92 to Reedsville and W.Va. 7 to the Monongalia County line, Kalbaugh’s targeted area. Morris is concerned that this is a political move by local powers that be, but WVDNR Game Management Supervisor Chris Ryan refuted that with his set of biological facts. On one side, he noted that Preston County should have been split during the last major overhaul of the black bear plan in 2008 due to lack of acreage suitable to hunt behind hounds, and now with time proving that to be true, it’s time to make a change.
“Well they’re wrong on that,” Ryan said. “It’s been 12 years since we’ve had the major overhaul to the bear plan. In 2008, when I came up with most of this methodology, the black bear population was expanding in the state, so we had to come up with a defendable way to propose these bear hunting seasons and something everyone could understand.
“At that time, the example I used was that Hancock County is 88 square miles – there are not very many guys who are going to run their bear dogs [there]. You’ve got Pocahontas County or Tucker County that have some of the most public land east of the Mississippi percentage-wise. So, obviously, in places like that, there are a lot of public land opportunities. We had to get away from those places in the middle where you don’t have every landowner in the world upset because [hounds are] running over your piece of property.”
A recent Facebook post written by Grafton resident Dillon Williams, an acquaintance of Kalbaugh and Morris, states, “By my understanding, this proposal came about over a number of complaints by landowners. Hound hunters in this area have been doing everything the right way and gained permission before entering anyone’s land. When running bear dogs do tend to cross ground that we don’t intend them to. But most of the time they are just passing through (chasing the bear) and if the hounds do hold up on the property or tree the bear on that property, permission is always obtained before entering.”
Morris concurs, noting that with most hunting anymore, “there’s always going to be hate.” Morris also said that her daughter’s hunting group always follows the rules, asks permission to pull hounds off treed bears and is generally courteous to landowners.
However, the DNR doesn’t make knee-jerk decisions based on one or two complaints. To lead to change, a complaint needs to be credible, and without naming anyone Ryan was clear that his source had a legitimate reason to contact the agency.
“It was not a senator or delegate or political pressure. People will give comments to the Division of Natural Resources about anything and everything,” he said. “When somebody has a legitimate complaint and has the data, we have to listen to them and analyze the data objectively. And that western part of Preston County that goes with western Upshur and western Barbour, does not qualify to [run] dogs.
“We don’t change a season based on one person calling saying, ‘I don’t like fill in the blank in whatever county.’ Most of our management programs are laid out in 5-year plans. They’re thought out to scientifically justify the reasoning for those proposals.”
Currently, Upshur and Barbour counties only allow hunting with dogs east of Route 20 and Route 92, respectively. In 2019, there were 67 bears harvested in Barbour County and 42 harvested in Upshur County. Preston County recorded 106 kills. Some of the highest recorded harvests were in counties that are part of the Monongahela National Forest with higher elevations, such as Randolph (242), Webster (193), Pendleton (182), Greenbrier (153), and Pocahontas (135), plus southern counties outside of the National Forest’s boundaries like Fayette (181), Boone (170), McDowell (156) and Kanawha (120). This coincides with another point Ryan made, that even though it may take away private lands to hunt on there are still plenty of public land opportunities in the staggered seasons, especially for young hunters.
“One of the things we came up with is this ranking methodology where we look at a number of different factors and say whether each of these counties should or should not be open to bear hunting with dogs,” Ryan said. “One of these prime places is the number of large tracts of land over 1,000 acres. I know that sounds arbitrary, but basically, it was something everyone could understand. At that time, Barbour [and Upshur counties] were split east to west. Preston County probably should have been split east to west. If you look on Google Earth, you can pretty much see that the western part of Preston County doesn’t have large tracts of land. Thirteen years ago, we didn’t have many complaints about people running in that area, so we lumped Preston together. Over time, because there are very few tracts of large land in that area, realistically there’s not enough to keep the dogs on a [single] tract of land. They’re going to go over multiple tracts of private land.”
It’s disheartening for a young person to lose an area of hunting land – especially in a time when younger generations aren’t picking up hunting – but there are other options, such as traveling to another county to hunt behind hounds. This is something Morris admitted doing, taking Kalbaugh to Logan County in the early season.
Further, the DNR is not a step closer to removing hunting behind hounds completely, as Ryan himself owns hounds that he hunts with. This whole situation simply boils down to the agency objectively looking at data and providing hunters and landowners with an equal slice of the pie.
Moving forward, it’s up to the Natural Resources Commission to decide what to do about the proposals: They can either accept the new season or reject it. Sportsmans’ thoughts are considered in this process, and the mother-daughter duo has been helping folks make their opinions known. Currently, Morris notes that they have submitted 80 surveys to the DNR.
“The only way to get our opinions out is for people to fill those [DNR] surveys out and send them in,” Morris said. “For me now, yes, I’m backing her and her fight, but I’m trying to get people to voice their opinions.”
For now, until that decision comes, it’s a waiting game.
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