In 1954, a Wisconsin bear trapper threw an armload of firecrackers into a den to drive off a mother bear and steal her three cubs. It was the third time in his career he’d done it. The game warden who responded took the cubs — and the trapper was flabbergasted that new laws were coming to stop him.

That man’s name was Dan Dehart, and by then he’d already trapped or shot over 100 bears in a state where, before the 1950s, bears had zero protection at all — shot and trapped in unlimited numbers, any time of year, treated as vermin. Public outrage at what he did to that den, not hunters policing their own, is what ended it. By 1957, bear trapping was banned outright.

Seventy-two years later, the same instinct runs the show — it’s just wearing a campaign finance report instead of a trap. Below: what the Wisconsin Bear Hunters Association paid for, what they got, and why a hunter today can shoot a lactating mother off a bait pile using the same excuse Dehart used at that den — he just didn’t know better.

Before Wisconsin had any meaningful bear protections, Dan Dehart of Crandon was one of the men doing exactly what the industry today swears hunters would never do. Born in 1896, he shot his first bear at fourteen. By the early 1950s he’d trapped or shot over 100 bears using mammoth traps and, when a den was easy pickings, fire.

It was the third time in his career he’d robbed a den. Public outrage — not the hunting community — is what changed the law. By 1957, bear trapping was completely prohibited in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Bear Hunters Association runs a legal check-bundling conduit — a mechanism that funnels member contributions to candidates. Since 2000, it has funneled nearly $369,000 to legislative and statewide candidates, roughly 72% of it to Republicans. In 2016 alone it moved a record $63,565.

The organization also spent $57,000 lobbying in the 2015–16 session, on top of the conduit money. Its legislative advice comes from a former state senator turned lobbyist with more than a dozen clients — this is a professionalized political operation, not a hunting club that occasionally writes a letter.

In the 2015–16 session, the legislature delivered the WBHA’s top policy priorities in a single budget bill. 2015 Wisconsin Act 55 eliminated the Class B bear hunting license outright.

That same session, the legislature also passed the law making it illegal to photograph, record, or videotape hunters — up to $10,000 and nine months in jail — introduced by a lawmaker who said he’d heard complaints from bear hunters upset that people opposed to baiting and hounding were following them. The same session eliminated the 48-hour gun waiting period and legalized switchblades. This was not incremental. It was a coordinated legislative sweep, delivered in one cycle, for one industry.

Deregulating baiting and hound training meant an unmonitored, unlimited number of dogs running through wolf territory all summer. Dog deaths from wolves rose. The industry’s answer was not to shorten the training season or cap bait volume — it was 2017 Senate Bill 602, introduced by the legislature’s top WBHA-funded recipients, addressing enforcement of federal and state wolf-management law and the killing of wolves.

Same pattern as 2015: when their own choices created a problem — more dogs, more bait, more wolf contact — the legislative fix was never to regulate the hunters. It was to shield them.

Dehart knew exactly what he was doing when he threw firecrackers at a mother to get her cubs. Today’s system doesn’t require a hunter to know anything. Bears are commonly baited with hounds and shot at close range once treed — and industry guidance itself admits sex identification at a bait site is not foolproof. A cautious hunter, acting entirely in good faith, can still take a lactating female because she came to the bait alone, having stashed her cubs in a nearby tree first — standard behavior the industry’s own hunter education material describes.

Dehart’s excuse was that nobody had told him not to. Today’s hunter’s excuse is that nobody can tell, from the bait site, that she’s a mother at all. Neither one changes what happens to the cubs left behind.

Nothing about this stopped in 2017. Bear bait still has no volume cap, no registration, and no content testing. The DNR’s own necropsies show cubs dying of chocolate poisoning, and the regulatory response is one sentence encouraging hunters to minimize it. The Wisconsin Conservation Congress Bear Committee has voted down every citizen resolution to change any of this for over a decade — chocolate bans, bait registration, shortened seasons — while the public voted for reform by margins as high as 7 to 1 in the same spring hearings.

Even Walter Palmer — the dentist who became internationally infamous for killing Cecil the Lion — had already shown Wisconsin exactly what this system produces. In 2006 he killed a bear 40 miles outside his permitted zone, then falsified the kill location at a state registration station. He pleaded guilty to a federal felony in 2008. The system that let that happen is the same one the WBHA has spent two decades making looser, not tighter.

We don’t have a conduit. We don’t have a lobbyist on retainer. We file records requests, testify at hearings the committee tries to cut short, and put the state’s own documents — its bill records, its campaign finance data, its necropsy reports — in front of the people who are supposed to be regulating this.

We are entirely volunteer-run. No paid staff. No corporate funding. Outspent by thousands. The good news is we don’t need to match their conduit — we need to out-document it, and we already have.