Your reply is simplistic, but bear biology/life history is quite complex. Elder females not only regulate population, they teach their young the way of the bear. Kill the females and it's a bloody free for all with rogue animals having to fend for themselves and unregulated breeding. There are many instances of this in nature - bears, deer, coyote, elephants - where hunting causes increases in animal-human conflict and population size (the latter from compensatory reproduction). The only way hunting works is through eradication, and then you have removed all of the other functions of bear, deer, etc. from the forest - like plant/tree propagule dispersal, nutrient cycling, and more. As the animal control officer/LEO in the CT town with the biggest bear-human interaction problem told us, he doesn't have a bear problem, he has a people problem. NO REWARDS, NO BEARS. There's simple for you.

I've done 30+ years as a forest ecologist in CT and even longer as a student of the primary literature of behavioral and population ecology. I've seen this in play all across New England including on forestlands in Maine on properties of up to 10,000 acres.

DEEP is counting on you not knowing (or caring about) any of this. They are all about killing, logging, and destroying, the very antithesis of environmental protection.