They tried suing. Then they tried flooding the lottery system. Now, in a last-ditch effort to thwart the upcoming Florida black bear hunt, a group of bear advocates is offering to pay hunters $2,000 in exchange for not using their tags.
Bear Warriors United first announced the “Black Friday Bear Deal” on Nov. 28 to coincide with the shopping holiday. By Sunday, however, the original award amount had doubled. BWU explained in a Nov. 30 Facebook post that a bear advocate (who wishes to remain anonymous) had committed to matching the $1,000 that was initially offered by Eric Herrholz, the founder of FIGHT.TV.
“Each hunter who was issued a black bear killing [sic] permit by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission AND agrees to not use the permit AND not kill a Florida Black Bear will now receive $2,000,” the post reads. “We have the FWC’s list of bear tag holders and all of their contact information. We will confirm identities and provide a contract to be signed by each FWC bear tag holder before issuing the $2,000.”
BWU executive director Katrina Shadix tells Outdoor Life she’s heard from more than 20 hunters willing to take the $2,000 deal.
“There have been several people who’ve reached out and said, ‘I could use that money for my family,’” she says.
Although she objects to being labeled an anti-hunter, Shadix is openly and adamantly against the hunting of Florida’s black bears, and she’s been actively working to end bear hunting there since 2015, when the state held its last regulated black bear hunt. She says she grew up in a hunting family and is a gun-owning, registered Republican. And she explains that her opposition to bear hunting is more about preserving the state’s wild places, which she claims are being destroyed with FWC’s permission to make way for more development. (She points to FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto’s role as the CEO of a real-estate development company as a clear conflict of interest.)
Shadix is currently vetting the 20-plus hunters she’s heard from to make sure they’re legitimate. She then plans to forward their information along to Herrholz’s attorney, who is drawing up legal contracts to ensure that hunters don’t break the agreement by filling their tag or trying to sell or transfer it, which is illegal in Florida.
“I’ve already contacted FWC and told them I’m doing this, and that I’m not involved [as a financier,] Shadix explains.” I’m just doing social media outreach to get the word out.”
She says she’s been discussing the idea with Herrholz since the spring, when he called her out of the blue. Herrholz told her he’d heard about ongoing efforts by BWU and other activist groups to stop the 2025 black bear hunt, which was approved unanimously by FWC commissioners in August. Those efforts include multiple lawsuits that BWU has filed against FWC. Their most recent legal action, a temporary preliminary injunction to stop the hunt, was denied by a judge on Nov. 24. Shadix says a lawsuit they filed in September is still moving forward.
“[Herrholz] told me he’d gotten my name from several sources, and that he has bears on his own property. He said, and I quote, ‘I’m rich as fuck. And no one’s going to kill my bears.’”
Read Next: 163K People Just Applied for 172 Florida Bear Tags. A Bunch of Applicants Were Anti-Hunters
Shadix claims that the people she’s heard from so far are all license-holding hunters (both residents and nonresidents) who’ve chosen to remain anonymous, and not anti-hunters who applied for a tag in the hope of “sparing a bear” by keeping that tag away from a legitimate hunter. Shadix says she knows all the activists who drew tags, and she confirms that at least 43 of them were successful in drawing one of the 172 available tags.
Which means that if 20 or more hunters actually sign up for the $2,000 payout, more than 36 percent of the bear tags sold by FWC could theoretically go unused. And with the Dec. 6 opener just days away, Shadix says her organization and others will keep trying to thwart this year’s hunt (and possibly future hunts) by surveilling hunters in the woods. She says they’ve already installed between 900 and 1,000 cellular trail cameras on public and private lands across the state’s four bear hunting zones.
“Everyone’s going to be watching from their phones,” Shadix says.
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