Bear Hunt Permit Lottery Reopens as FWC Enters Second Year of Three-Year Plan
Applications for Florida's black bear hunt lottery are open through Sept. 21, reviving a fight over conservation, cruelty and who gets a say in wildlife policy across the state, including bear country near the Nature Coast.
A Lottery With Two Kinds of Winners
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has reopened applications for its black bear hunting permit lottery, running Sept. 11 through Sept. 21. This year the agency will award 215 permits, up from the 172 issued in 2025 out of more than 163,000 entries statewide. The lottery is part of a three-year hunting plan the FWC approved that runs through 2027, meaning this fall marks the second season since Florida ended a decade-long pause on bear hunting.
Entry costs $5 per chance, with no cap on how many entries a single applicant can buy. Last year one hunter spent $5,000 on 1,000 entries. The math has turned the lottery into something more than a hunting sign-up sheet, it has become a proxy battle over whether the hunt should happen at all.
Permits as Protest
Some entrants say they buy chances specifically to keep a tag out of a hunter’s hands. A 74-year-old Tallahassee man who bought 50 entries last year won a permit and never used it, telling reporters it was “the only tool that we have to keep someone else from getting a permit.” A Spring Hill resident who spent $25 on five entries also won and declined to hunt, later turning down a $2,000 offer from an advocacy group for his unused tag. A Casselberry woman who entered 350 times and won a permit in 2025 said she plans to apply again this year, not to hunt, but to keep applying pressure against the program.
Their reasoning splits along two lines: distrust of the FWC’s population data and objection to hunting methods, including bowhunting, which one opponent described as prolonging suffering and risking orphaned cubs if a lactating female is killed.
The Case for a Managed Hunt
Supporters counter that regulated hunting is standard wildlife management, not indiscriminate killing. The president of The Future of Hunting in Florida, a certified wildlife biologist since 1996, said hunting remains “the best, most effective, and least costly tool in our tool bag” for controlling bear numbers he argues have grown too large. He was part of a group that killed seven of the 52 bears harvested during the 2025 season, which ran Dec. 6 through Dec. 28.
He drew a distinction between conservation, what he calls “wise use” of a resource, and preservation, which he said keeps a species untouched. To him, a regulated harvest fits squarely in the first category.
Cars, Not Just Rifles
FWC data cited in the reporting shows vehicles kill more than 300 Florida black bears each year on average over the past decade, concentrated in Central Florida counties including Seminole, Orange and Osceola. That toll fuels a separate argument from hunt opponents: that road mortality already suppresses bear numbers, undercutting the case that a hunt is necessary. One critic argued the bears killed by hunters are not the same animals causing nuisance complaints near neighborhoods, since hunts occur in wild areas rather than developed ones. He instead called for statewide bear-proof trash containers to cut off the food sources that draw bears into populated areas in the first place.
What’s Actually Open Now
The concrete action for readers is narrow but real: FWC’s application window for 2026 bear hunting permits closes Sept. 21. The commission’s three-year plan runs through 2027, meaning the debate over permit numbers, methods and data will resurface at least once more before any policy reset. Florida black bears range across much of the state’s forested public land, including areas near the Big Bend and Nature Coast, making the FWC’s population estimates and hunt-zone boundaries a subject worth tracking for anyone near bear habitat in this region.