The Minnesota DNR made one request this season. Fifty bears, out of thousands, are wearing GPS collars and ear tags for an ongoing research study. Hunters aren’t required to skip them — it’s still perfectly legal to take one. The DNR simply asked, politely, if hunters would consider not shooting the fifty bears that are actively generating the data everyone claims to want.

Here is how bear hunters actually responded, in their own names, on the DNR’s own public page.

The most basic ask — leave the fifty collared bears alone so the study isn’t compromised — was met, over and over, with open contempt for the idea of a limit at all.

And for the ones who didn’t need to say it outright, there was still a joke to make out of the animal’s death:

This is the part that should end the debate about who actually respects science in this fight. When a state agency described exactly what the collars measure — denning, reproduction, response to food supply, human interaction, several thousand data points per bear per year — the hunting community’s response wasn’t curiosity. It was denial that the research has any value at all.

Jason Paplow didn’t stop at dismissing the science — he told other hunters to make shooting a collared bear a personal goal, specifically because he doesn’t trust what the DNR will do with the data. Not “I disagree with the methodology.” A stated intent to sabotage the study.

Two comments, without meaning to, admit the whole thing.

Read that again. Jake Anderson is arguing, in defense of hunters, that sparing a collared bear would corrupt the data. He’s not wrong that harvest pressure is part of what’s studied — but the comment gives away that the entire objection to “please don’t shoot the research bears” was never really about scientific integrity. It was about not wanting to be told no.

Meant as a joke about the DNR overreaching. Twenty-five people liked it. Read straight, it’s an admission: the only way this community would ever stop shooting collared bears is if every bear had a collar and there were none left to distinguish.

Buried in the pile, one comment argued for something better — and it’s worth including, because it proves this isn’t every hunter, it’s a culture that the loudest and most-liked comments are actively building.

That’s the ask. Not a suggestion box comment. A law. Wisconsin doesn’t have one. Nothing here requires it, and after reading this thread, it’s obvious why nothing here should be voluntary.

This is the exact population the Wisconsin Conservation Congress Bear Committee answers to, and the exact population the legislature has spent a decade deregulating for. Every fact-based ask this series has documented — bait caps, chocolate bans, registration, shortened seasons — runs into this wall. Not indifference. Open hostility to the idea that any limit should exist.

We are entirely volunteer-run. No paid staff. No corporate funding. Outspent by thousands. We file anyway, because the alternative is letting a Facebook comment section be the final word on how this state manages a public wildlife resource.