A circle of seven or so men swap stories and sip morning coffee, wiggling appendages to help brave a rare Louisiana frost. They’re at a hunting camp near the border of Franklin and Tensah Parish, about three hours north of Baton Rouge. It's at the point of highway driving where roadside Cajun joints and personal injury billboards give way to bone-white Baptist steeples and rusted water towers. And for two weeks in December, the region is where a select few live out a coveted dream in the Sportsman’s paradise. One of the men in the group, a Baton Rouge resident in his late 20s, is among the first 10 Louisianans to legally hunt black bears in the state since the Reagan administration, a privilege acquired in a lottery of nearly 1,000 applicants.
Excitement from the previous night spilled into the conversation. The man with the bear tag, wishing to remain anonymous, had shot what he described as a 500-pound male minutes before sundown.
“I knew when he came out of the woods he had a chance to be one of the heaviest ever killed in the state of Louisiana,” he said.
But the pencil-sized bullet fired from his 7 mm magnum rifle had not been fatal, striking just above the vitals near the shoulder. Aided by a handful of buddies, the hunter unsuccessfully tracked paw prints and blood-stained leaves until the early morning.
“They don’t bleed a lot. The fat closes up and they have hair that long, it's like a mop. It soaks it up,” said John Hanks, the large carnivore manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife, comparing their dense muscles and bones to a gorilla’s.
Though hunting bears isn’t his cup of tea, the 49-year-old grew up an outdoorsman in Northern Louisiana.
“When I was a kid everybody hunted,” said Hanks. “We did things more outside because there was none of this Fortnite, Call of Duty…playing online with kids from across the world until three in the morning.”
For the last two years, Hanks has likely spent more time lying supine in bear dens than anyone else in the state. The possible exception is the biologist standing next to him in the circle, John Berry. The two Johns make up Louisiana’s black bear program, and are on call 24/7 to ensure smooth sailing for the inaugural hunt, which spans seven different parishes in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley in the northeast corner of the state. Along with the Atchafalaya River Basin, it's the oldest and densest population of bears in the state.
“You could see a bear in any of the 64 parishes. There are certainly bears in west Louisiana and the toe of the boot but not at that density,” said Hanks.
"We're about to get into it this morning, aren't we?" said Joshua Cook as he stepped out of his pickup truck. Cook is the co-owner of Toadaline Kennels and a well-known breeder of hunting dogs in the area. He was joined by Uno, a Catahoula Leopard Dog with ice-blue eyes and a variegated coat of black, white, and brown fur.
Catahoulas, first bred by Louisiana's Native Americans and now the state dog, were traditionally used to herd free-range cattle before hunters discovered their ability to track the scent of wild boar and deer in fight-or-flight mode.
“They can smell the impending doom of that animal,” said Cook.
Uno is trained to detect pheromones secreted from the deer's interdigital glands located between their cloven hooves. The morning marked his debut in chasing black bears.
Within minutes, the group loaded into ATVs and trucks, heading toward the site of the previous night's shot. A few yards from an elevated hunting blind, a pile of Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, peanut butter, and apples lay in the middle of the gravel road, the latter more closely resembling the bear’s opportunistically omnivorous diet of berries, agricultural produce, and nuts. Like most bear populations, Louisiana’s black bears undergo a process called hyperphagia in the fall, where they engage in rapid and excessive eating to build up fat reserves for the winter months.
“A pecan orchard here in the fall is like a salmon stream in Alaska,” said Hanks. “They normally wouldn’t tolerate each other that much, but during that time they’re only worried about one thing: eating.
While not true hibernators, the bears experience a significant decline in food consumption and metabolic activity. A daily caloric intake of 30,000 calories in the fall drops to about six or seven thousand in the winter, said Hanks.
Off the gravel road, Uno’s ears perked to the metallic click of buckshot settling into place.
“When that gun cocks…he knows it's game time,” said Cook.
Equipped with a Garmin tracking device to his collar, the energetic Catahoula led the way through the thicket, as Hanks, Cook and the man wielding the bear tag followed close behind the wagging tail.
Population rebound
Though most residents are familiar with stalking boars, bucks, and birds in the state, Black bear hunting in Louisiana has been relegated to the stuff of legends. A short drive north of the camp in Tensas National Refuge, Theodore Roosevelt shot a black bear in 1907, describing it in his journal as a great adventure in the “Louisiana Canebrakes.” The hunt followed an unsuccessful 1902 expedition in Sharkey County, Mississippi, a fingernail’s length across state lines on a roadmap. As the story goes, Holt Collier, a former slave credited with killing more than 3,000 bears in his lifetime, had captured and tied a bear to a tree for Roosevelt. But killing an animal served on a silver platter wasn't the famously conservation-minded president’s style. His refusal made national headlines, becoming the inspiration for plush toys now ubiquitous in the bedrooms of millions of American children: the “Teddy” Bear.
The event took place during the initial Mississippi outing, but at a December press conference, Gov. Jeff Landry offered some revisionist history.
“We claim that the president shot the bear in Louisiana,” he said, before describing the black bear's resurgence as a “great conservation success story.”
“I want to make sure everyone recognizes what a leader Louisiana is in conservation,” he added. Despite the Louisiana coast losing about a football field of land every 100 minutes, Landry’s statement may have some merit when confined to the state’s northern tip. After years of overhunting and deforestation driven by row crop farming and logging, Louisiana's bear population dwindled to the hundreds before being placed on the endangered species list in 1992. Since then, conservation efforts by state agencies and private landowners have revived their numbers, primarily by reforesting nearly 900,000 acres of old farmland. Many of this year's hunters, for example, navigate through thickets of palmettos, evergreen shrubs, and the skeletal branches of young bottomland hardwood forests that were once soybean farms.
"These corridors and new habitats have helped connect the small, isolated populations," said Hanks. Today, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) estimates about 1,200 bears live in Louisiana, a population they claim is stable and growing. With denser populations, Hanks says the bears have reached their "social carrying capacity," a point where farmers and motorists are increasingly encountering bears. Hunters have also reported bears raiding their deer feeders and, in some cases, dragging away harvested game before the hunters can retrieve it.
The rising interactions led Rep. Travis Johnson (D-Vidalia) to introduce a resolution proposing a bear hunt in Northeast Louisiana, which passed last spring. While Hanks believes hunting ten bears (excluding cubs and females with cubs) shouldn’t significantly affect their numbers, he says it might make the creatures less inclined to willingly interact with humans.
Bearing the divide
As seen on thousands of customized state license plates, black bears are Louisiana’s state mammal, a species so beloved for their intelligence, strength, and nobility that Native Americans revered them as spiritual guides. Naturally, killing them to appease modern human whims and habits is going to cause some strife, and Hanks says he receives about three to four calls a week from folks “cussing him a blue streak.”
“This bear season has been in the works for the years,” he said. “This administration supports it but we’ve been doing this ever since we got them off the list in 2016.”
Jeff Dorson, executive director of the Louisiana Humane Society, has advocated for efforts to live peacefully with the species. Last year, he launched an online petition to stop the hunt. Despite 7,500 signatories, it was ultimately ruled inadmissible due to missing proof of the signatories’ state of residence.
“They’re part of our landscape, our history, our culture,” he said. “There’s no real attempt to let the public know that there are other ways to appreciate the species besides killing them.”
Dorson believes that the inaugural hunt marks the beginning of regression back to the days of overhunting.
“Once they get their foot in the door and the public gets used to it, 10 becomes 20 becomes 30 becomes 100,” he said. “I don't understand this mentality where everything is ours and none is left for nature.”
He also highlights statistics from the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, an environmental organization that estimates the state's bear population closer to 500-600. For the past two decades, the LDWF has used Capture-Mark-Recapture (CMR) techniques, collecting hair samples and attaching GPS collars to continuously track bear movement and monitor populations. But the Basinkeeper has criticized the LDWF's estimates as "misleading and subject to an uncomfortably wide margin of error." They also allege ongoing clearcutting in critical bear habitats managed by the LDWF.
"We are on the margins of what is needed genetically for Louisiana black bears to survive long-term,” said Dean Wilson, executive director of the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper. “This is not the time for a black bear hunt."
In 2020, Basinkeeper, joined by the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations, challenged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's delisting decision in court, but a federal judge upheld the removal from the endangered species list in 2024. One group that intervened in the case was Safari Club International (SCI), a conservation and hunting organization. In 2024, the group spent $740,000 on lobbying on behalf of hunters and has faced criticism for endorsing hunts of endangered African species on game ranches in Texas and Florida and giving awards for hunting iconic African wildlife. SCI supporters counter that the group raises millions for conservation and wildlife education. Prior to the hunt, Maria Davidson, SCI's conservation program manager and Hanks's predecessor at LDWF, conducted education courses required for the hunters to learn about the bear’s history, regulations, and proper cooking techniques.
Jean Marmade, a hunter who attended the course, defends the practice: "You may not agree with it, but no one cares more about the sustainability of this species than these folks."
Nationwide, hunters fund approximately 60 percent of state wildlife agencies through various taxes and fees on hunting-related equipment. In Louisiana, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has apportioned around $255 million through the Pittman-Robertson Act, a federal excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment.
“The hunters were the ones paying for this bear recovery for all these years,” said Hanks.
Critics argue, however, that the majority of conservation funding, including money for federal agencies and tax revenue from gun sales, actually comes from non-hunters. One 2014 study conducted by Nevadans for Responsible Wildlife Management found that hunters funded just 6% of total wildlife conservation programs.
A long wait
After an hour of fruitless search, most of the party had returned to loitering near the vehicles while Crook and Uno remained a few hundred yards into the woods. Then Hanks received a call.
“They saw the bear,” he said. “The dog found him.”
According to Crook’s account, when he found Uno, the dog was staring at the lumbering black mass as it calmly receded into denser vegetation, about 50 to 60 yards from where Crook stood alone.
“I’m assuming he could smell the little bit of blood on the bear,” said Cook. “Or the bear put off some sort of adrenaline smell.”
Then for a handful of seconds, Crook faced a critical question: Do you shoot the bear?
“When I’m looking at that bear, I have to run through, is it the right bear? Is the bear mortally wounded? If I shoot this bear am I going to get in trouble because I’m not the tag holder?”
Using hunting dogs to track and kill non-mortally wounded bears is illegal. Even assuming the bear was on its last leg, shooting it without a tag would, in the best-case scenario, lead to an awkward conversation with the actual tag holder and LDWF officials down the road.
“I made the right decision,” he said a few days later.
By the time the two had met up with the rest of the group, Uno had a deep patch of missing fur revealing bare, bloody flesh – a laceration Crook attributes to the dog initially approaching the bear thinking it was dead. Later, a shave at the vet showed a bruised rib cage.
“You could actually see the slide marks of the claws,” said Crook. “He’ll be recovered in a couple of days and back on the hoof.”
There was another hour of wandering before the group decided to pack in for the day, then debated whether to keep searching through the weekend or find another landowner willing to let them start the process from the beginning.
“I almost threw up, I’m sorry,” said the tag holder. “It’s a terrible feeling how hard we hunted for this thing.
For three more days, the hunter waited, holding out hope the bear was still close by, but not wanting to push it further from the area.
“One day I was very excited and had hope. Then a day would go by without the bear, I was at an all-time low," the hunter said.
On Day 4, according to the hunter’s account, they decided to drive a tractor through dense brush near a new set of blood patches.
Lying in thickets about 750 yards from the original spot of the shot, the bear sat, wounded in solitude.
The chase, the wait, and the persistence had paid off. At 515 pounds, it was the largest of the six bears killed thus far. LDWF officials are required to collect blood samples and teeth from each recovery before the bears are gutted and taken to a local processing facility. With one-third of the animal edible meat, the patient hunter could now provide more than 300 plates of 8 oz sausages, steaks, hamburgers, and any other recipe he decides to try, much of which he plans to share with close friends and family.
“To be able to do that in our backyard is what was really neat,” he said. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”