Exercising the Right
A Bear of a Time
This column usually features stories of humans acting like animals and getting themselves shot by their would-be victims acting in self-defense. But this story out of Canton, Connecticut, involved an actual animal getting shot in what appears to be a case of a human acting in self-defense. WFSB.com reported on June 3 about a local business owner who was forced to kill a black bear after it charged at him. The Connecticut State Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) has assumed total control of the investigation from the Canton police, but Captain Andrew Schiffer explained to the local media what happened: “The essential facts are that the bear had been in a trash bin and there was trash debris spilled…. The business owner was cleaning up and the bear returned to the bin. The business owner said the bear advanced on him and he shot the bear in self-defense.”
The wild story got even wilder when WFSB’s cameras recorded a second bear in the same area where the first one was shot. Bonnie Shugrue, who takes dance lessons near the business where the bear was shot, was not surprised by what happened. She told WFSB that she “saw a bear walking through this parking lot a couple weeks ago,” and that there are also a lot of bears near where she lives. “The bears in our neighborhood, they know [garbage] pick up is Tuesday and so they come down from the hills and knock ... all the garbage cans over.”
Connecticut state law permits the killing of bears during normal hunting season by licensed hunters using bear tags issued by DEEP, but bears can also be killed in self-defense outside of the hunting season if certain conditions are met. In this particular case, a determination as to whether the shooting of the bear was justifiable self-defense will hinge on whether the shooter had a reasonable belief that the bear was about to inflict great bodily harm on him.
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