LOUISIANA — The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) recently closed its Louisiana Black Bear Hunting Lottery on Sept. 25 with a total of 973 total applications and 814 individual applicants entering.
The Louisiana black bear hunting season opened up to state-wide hunters on Aug. 29 and ran through Sept. 25, the LDWF announced. A total of 10 permits were issued from the 2024 lottery.
This marks the first lottery since the species was removed from protections under the Endangered Species Act in 2016.
Wildlife experts estimate there are over 1,200 black bears in the state, which is up from around 600 in 2014.
Hunters must have a valid black bear hunting license before applying for the general black bear lottery, LDWF says. For this year’s lottery, a total of 649 black bear hunting licenses were sold, the agency reports.
Applicants not selected in this year’s lottery will be given a preference point for each subsequent year that they apply. Each preference point serves as an additional lottery opportunity and points are capped at five.
Successful lottery applicants are not eligible to be selected for another bear permit for two years after being drawn.
A $50 non-refundable application will be charged to each applicant. All revenue derived from the lottery will be deposited into a conservation fund, which will be used exclusively for managing, conserving, and restoring Louisiana black bears.
Successful applicants will also need to attend a LDWF bear hunting training course on Nov. 2 or Nov. 14 before hunting.
The hunt will be confined to parishes in northeast Louisiana, which includes Tensas, Madison, East Carroll, and West Carroll parishes, along with portions of Richland, Franklin, and Catahoula Parishes.
LDWF says the season will begin Dec. 7 and run through. Dec. 22.
Louisiana has some longstanding historical ties with black bear hunting. Former President Theodore Roosevelt hunted the animal twice in Louisiana, once in 1902 and again in 1907, hunting on land that is now near the Theodore Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge near Vicksburg.
On the 1902 hunt, which took Roosevelt through Mississippi and Louisiana, Roosevelt famously refused to shoot a black bear that had been cornered and tied to a tree. A political cartoonist then used that story as inspiration, writing a cartoon called “Teddy’s Bear.”
Within weeks, a company began creating small toy bears, which became very popular nationally. To this day, the bears are still known as “Teddy Bears.”
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