ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Organizers of a petition drive to ban bear baiting in Alaska delivered more than 33,500 signatures Thursday to the state elections office.

A group calling itself the Citizens United Against Bear Baiting (CUBB), is behind the ballot initiative. CUBB's position is that intentionally feeding and attracting black bears to hunt, photograph or view is bad for bears and risky to humans.

But the Alaska Department of Fish and Game says baiting black bears is a useful wildlife management tool, particularly in areas with thick vegetation where bears are difficult to hunt. Alaska does not allow baiting of brown bears.

Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming also allow bear baiting, according to CUBB. It is permitted in Arkansas but only on private land.

The group says statewide initiatives in the 1990s were successful in outlawing bear baiting in Colorado, Oregon and Washington.

Former Lt. Gov. Lowell Thomas Jr., one of three people to sponsor the petition drive, said supporters collected 10,000 more signatures than is required to get the measure on the November ballot. The other sponsors are John Erickson, a big-game hunter and master guide, and George Pollard, a retired big-game hunter and master guide.

To get the measure on the 2004 ballot, 10 percent or 23,285 Alaskans who voted in the last election, had to sign the petition.

"Clearly, this is an issue that voters want on the ballot," Thomas said.

The ballot initiative says, "A person may not bait or intentionally feed a bear for the purpose of hunting, photographing or viewing."

A violation would be a misdemeanor.

Thomas said bear baiting is bad on two fronts.

"It strikes me as being unsportsmanlike conduct," he said, an hour before delivering the signatures to the state Division of Elections Office. "It trains the bears to like food that is not their natural food. … We get them conditioned to human food and they continue to search for it when the baiting station is taken away."

Bait stations typically consist of old pastries, dog food, gut piles, fish heads, bacon grease or other foods, often laced with honey or syrup, to attract bears for easy shooting, CUBB said.

Last July, just as the petition drive was getting under way, the Department of Fish and Game issued an information sheet on bear baiting.

It said black bear baiting accounted for about 20 percent, or 403 of 2,045 black bears harvested in Alaska during the past 11 years. During that time, the number of bear baiting permits averaged 1,318.

In some areas of the Interior, baiting accounts for more than half of black bears killed.

"There is no evidence of a correlation between black bear baiting and occurrence of food-conditioned bears near human habitation," the agency said in its information sheet.

Bruce Bartley, a spokesman with Fish and Game in Anchorage, said bait stations are carefully regulated to keep problems to a minimum. Hunters and others who set up bait stations must register them with Fish and Game, which has a state map with push pins for each station.

Most of the bait stations are in three areas of Alaska: the Fairbanks area; north of Anchorage from Palmer to Wasilla to Willow; and the upper Kenai Peninsula, Bartley said. Those areas tend to have dense vegetation, making it extremely difficult to get close to a bear, he said.

While problems occasionally arise, bear baiting stations are heavily regulated, Bartley said. Rules include prohibiting any bait station within one mile of a house, seasonal cabin or campground. Bait stations also can't be within a quarter-mile of a maintained road, trail or railroad track, as well as popular salmon streams.