I have a sister who is involved in running a summer camp in a rural area of NY State. They had trouble with a bear hanging around the camp (& breaking into the kitchen etc.) and they called down the authorities to deal with it. So they came down and tranquilized it and took it away, and in the course of this they also ran tests on it, which included taking some blood and removing a tooth. They told my sister that this (the tooth) is so that they can determine its age.
Is this really SOP in such cases? How big of a deal is it to determine the age of some random bear that they need to harm it for life? (I assume bears need all their teeth in some manner, or they wouldn’t have so many.) Sounds bizarre. But yet, this is what they told her, and in one of the pictures she emailed me you can see the blood dripping from its muzzle.
The state is interested in monitoring the health and demographics of the bear population, and the removal of one tooth is not likely to be detrimental. Animals don’t normally have dental coverage, and loss of or damage to teeth through natural causes is not uncommon.
Black bears have 42 teeth. Presumably it wouldn’t be a canine or anything that they really need. It is apparently a premolar, and they have 15 more as backup. A bear that is discovered with a missing tooth is also “marked” as already having a record.
Here’s a NYS page on tooth extraction, although it is for already dead bears that hunters are required to turn in the tooth for.
I couldn’t help but think of that dentist that got tricked into that shooting of the lion Cecil (the complaint being his tour guides were corrupt and conducting an illegal hunt). He should take up bear hunting.
I don’t know what the status of that first sentence is currently, but the second one: he was charged with making false statements about his harvest of a black bear.