Friend,

Maine’s ballot initiative to ban dogging, baiting and trapping of bears was incredibly close, but the end results hurt. In the last few weeks of the election, pro bear hunting groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on television ads choc-full-o-lies about the dangers of bears. One ad even featured misleading footage of a bear in Florida with images of a screaming woman to imply Maine's bears were a danger to people, when in fact no such attack has occurred in Maine.

I'm proud of the work we did together. From May through Nov 3, we collected close to 150,000 pledges to oppose bear hunting in Maine, and reached more than 400,000 Mainers with hard hitting radio ads.

While we came up short in this last election, we haven’t given up. In 2015, we’ll be looking at approaches outside of the ballot system to ban these inhumane and outright cruel forms of hunting in Maine. And we’re also looking at other states where this is an opportunity for bear conservation.

We need to raise $2,500 by the end of this week if we’re going to devote the staff resources we need to protect bears in 2015. $2,500 will help us pay for:

Research into which states have winnable fights to protect the bears;
Introduce legislation to protect bears in Maine and at least one other state;
Hard hitting radio and internet ads in these states to educate voters.

Please chip in $200, $75, $35 or whatever you can to make sure that all bears are safe in their dens next year.

For the lions, tigers and bears,

Aaron and the rest of the Environmental Action team

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