NHL player’s trophy kill under investigation

Hunter may not technically qualify for licence

By Gerry Bellett, Vancouver Sun September 21, 2013

The B.C. Conservation Officer Service is investigating the trophy killing of a grizzly bear in May by NHL player Clayton Stoner, a defenceman with the Minnesota Wild.

Brennan Clarke, a spokesman for the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, which administers hunter licensing, said Thursday that a complaint had been received from the Raincoast Conservation Foundation that the bear may have been killed illegally.

“It’s something we have to look at,” said Clarke.

Stoner, who was born in Port McNeill on Northern Vancouver Island, was at the centre of a controversy earlier this month when The Vancouver Sun obtained pictures of him posing with the severed head and paw of a grizzly shot in the Kwatna estuary in an area midway between Bella Coola and Bella Bella.

The bear was shot in an area that Coastal First Nations had declared closed to trophy bear hunting and native groups denounced the killing of the bear which they said was “skinned and left to rot in a field.” (The provincial government does not recognize the First Nations ban.) Raincoast spokesman Brian Falconer said in a news release this week that the organization was concerned that the grizzly was killed illegally as Stoner might not be a resident of British Columbia.

Continue reading this article on its original site  at the Vancouver Sun.

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