Op-Ed: Bear hounding is cruel
September 2, 2025 | By Belin Tate After spending my summer researching bear hound hunting (hounding), I’ve come to the informed conclusion: hounding is cruel. Hounding in Vermont is often defended as a tradition and a way of connecting with the land, but tradition is no excuse for cruelty. Especially in a world that recognizes animal sentience, I feel that hounding is unnecessary and shameful.
For those who don’t know, hounding involves hunters using specifically bred dog breeds, like Plott hounds, to chase bears (and other wildlife) for the purpose of hunting them. Bears are chased up trees, making them easy prey for the armed hounders waiting below (I see it as hunting without the skill).
According to the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, the state’s black bear population is doing well. But that is looking only at the number of bears. We have not collected any data on how bears’ health is being impacted by being chased by packs of hounds for six long months (between the training and hunting seasons). Why should population numbers be the only data we look at to determine the health of the bear population? Does the quality of life not hold value? Is being in immense psychological distress not also a cruel way to live? Can hound hunting not be categorized as animal fighting (which is illegal in all 50 states)?
The way I see it, a bear could climb the first tree it encounters—so why doesn’t it? The most plausible explanation is that the bear doesn’t know that dogs can’t climb trees. For all it knows, the hounds might follow it upward, leaving it at an even greater disadvantage. So the bear runs. It runs until it is so physically exhausted that it cannot run anymore. The bear climbing the tree is a Hail Mary, so to speak.
The hound-hunting training season, specifically, seems especially brutal. It lasts the entirety of the summer, when mother bears are tending to their 5-month-old cubs. I see no purpose in chasing bears endlessly through the woods and tormenting them while they can do nothing but flee up a tree. The bears are physically run to exhaustion, then mentally tortured until a hunter can pull the debilitating dogs away. Why must we torture bears for the purpose of “training” the hounds?
I am not anti-hunting. I am anti-animal abuse. There might not be research about the mental effects of hounding on bears, but have you ever seen your dog react in a fearful manner, perhaps growling when a car drives too close or you speak too sternly? Have you heard of elephants mourning the loss of their herd member? Animals show emotion, and to be chased by relentless hounds would be a stressful and tormenting situation for any being.
I have also found several studies that describe the various negative physical impacts of hounding on bears. (see below)For example, hounding changes bears’ foraging patterns and increases stress, affecting both hibernation and reproduction.
With all this information in mind, I urge Vermont Fish & Wildlife to conduct more studies on the physical health of our Vermont bears and to ban hounding. With these changes enacted, I hope to look forward to a future that centers around responsible and ethical bear hunting.
Belin Tate is a wildlife advocate and conservation biology student at Middlebury College.
Source links from the author
Støen, O. G., Ordiz, A., Evans, A. L., Laske, T. G., Kindberg, J., Fröbert, O., Swenson, J. E., & Arnemo, J. M. (2015). Physiological evidence for a human-induced landscape of fear in brown bears (Ursus arctos). Physiology & behavior, 152(Pt A), 244–248.
Stillfried, M., Belant, J. L., Svoboda, N. J., Beyer, D. E., & Kramer-Schadt, S. (2015). When top predators become prey: Black bears alter movement behaviour in response to hunting pressure. Behavioural Processes, 120, 30–39.
Frank, S. C., Ordiz, A., Gosselin, J., Hertel, A., Kindberg, J., Leclerc, M., Pelletier, F., Steyaert, S. M., Støen, O.-G., Van de Walle, J., Zedrosser, A., & Swenson, J. E. (2017a). Indirect effects of Bear Hunting: A review from Scandinavia. Ursus, 28(2), 150–164.
Le Grand, L., Thorsen, N. H., Fuchs, B., Evans, A. L., Laske, T. G., Arnemo, J. M., Sæbø, S., & Støen, O.-G. (2019). Behavioral and physiological responses of Scandinavian Brown Bears (Ursus arctos) to dog hunts and human encounters. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 7.