After having what one described as a “significant impact” on Florida’s black bear hunt this month, conservationists could seek to add bears to the federal threatened species list.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on Tuesday reported 52 bears were killed during the hunt, which was held from Dec. 6 through Sunday. That was less than a third of the 172 bears that could have been killed.
The hunt began Dec. 6 and ended Sunday. It involved 172 one-bear-limit permit holders selected from over 160,000 applicants.
The Florida chapter of the Sierra Club encouraged opponents to apply for permits to prevent bear killings. Opponents reportedly got about 40 of the permits and offered up to $2,000 to some hunters to not use their permits, which cost $100 for Florida residents and $300 for non-residents. The group said at least four dozen permit holders never intended to use them.
The Florida black bear population has grown from several hundred in the 1970s to over 4,000. Critics questioned the hunt's necessity and transparency. They cited the lack of check-in stations and reliance on self-reported data through a hunting app.
The Florida black bear population is considered one of the state's conservation success stories, having grown from just several hundred bears in the 1970s to an estimate over 4,000.
Critics questioned the hunt's necessity and transparency, but they were unable to convince the courts to halt it. They cited the lack of check-in stations and reliance on self-reported data through a hunting app.
"The 2025 black bear hunt, rooted in sound scientific data, was a success," Roger Young, executive director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said in a statement.
The kill count may have been lower than expected for a range of reasons, including the possibilities that the state overestimated the population or conservationists managed to take up enough permits to make a difference, said Susannah Randolph, director of the Sierra Club's Florida chapter.
On Wednesday, Chuck O’Neal of Speak Up Wekiva, a group that opposed the hunt, compared this year to the last previous hunt in 2015.
“We made a significant impact on the number of bears killed this season. After 304 were killed in two days in 2015, 52 killed in three weeks is a significant improvement,” O’Neal said in an email. “However, this saga is by no means over. Buying up the tags was a stopgap measure, not a long-term solution. Now we move to get the Florida black bear listed as threatened at the federal level, through federal court action if necessary.”
Black bears were placed on the state's threatened list in 1974, when there were between 300 and 500 across Florida. At the time, hunting black bears was limited to three counties. In 1994, the hunting season was closed statewide. By 2002, the black-bear population was estimated at 3,000. A decade later, bears were removed from the state's list of threatened animals.
Until Tuesday, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had refused to divulge any details on the number of bears killed, despite multiple media requests.
"They have designed it so that they don't actually know the numbers, and they have been dodging the media," Randolph said. "So that is super fishy right off the bat."
This year's hunting plan had more stringent rules than the 2015 hunt, in which permits were provided to anyone who could pay for them, resulting in more than 3,700 permits issued. That led to a chaotic event that was shut down days early. Of the 304 bears killed, at least 38 were females with cubs, meaning the young bears may have died too.
The News Service of Florida and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
