KHUTZE INLET, British Columbia -- Harry McCowan, a grizzly-bear hunting guide, looked harassed.
Boatloads of nature tourists were buzzing up and down this coastal rain forest waterway. McCowan's taciturn Austrian hunting client was emitting signals of impatience, and while a helper loaded rifles and supplies into a seaplane, a black bear started pawing through the camp."There are too many people here," grumbled the veteran guide, whose seaplane was stenciled: "Selling the last frontier." While the helper sent the curious black bear bounding back into the woods, he continued: "I used to have a grizzly quota of nine, now I have one. I used to kill three or four. Now, with luck, I will take one."
But judging by the protests at Canada's overseas consulates and the petitions regularly dumped on the desk of the provincial minister of environment, McCowan may be fortunate to get even that.
British Columbia, which in the 1880s marketed itself in Europe as the "sportsman's Eden," is increasingly defensive about its status as the last Canadian province to allow a major grizzly bear hunt. From an average of 350 grizzlies killed each year through 1992, the annual "harvest" dropped last year to 207.
Under pressure, the province is quietly restricting hunting of what are among North America's largest land mammals. Under a lottery system introduced two years ago, only a quarter of the residents who apply get permits to hunt the bears. Areas along the border with the United States have been placed largely off-limits to hunting, following U.S. complaints that a grizzly protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act can be shot if it wanders across the border.
Toronto's Globe and Mail, echoing the sentiment of many Canadians, wrote in a recent editorial about the grizzly, "Given the scientific uncertainties about how many there are, the knowledge that the population is not large and the fact that the hunt serves no purpose, except giving hunters pleasure, why should it continue?"
Environmentalists agree. "Trophy hunting of North America's slowest-reproducing mammal is just unacceptable," said Wayne McCrory, a bear biologist. "We wiped them out from half of their range in Canada, and yet we continue to allow them to be hunted here."
As nature tourism soars on Canada's Pacific Coast, grizzly bear hunting shrivels in economic importance. Last year, according to the Environment Ministry, the grizzly hunt generated $700,000 in economic activity, compared with $2.5 billion generated by tourism as a whole.