One would hope that human society might someday take a quantum leap forward and not need to be constantly reminded to refrain from acting on our most base of impulses. For anyone who might be interested, here's another example of a bear of a different color needing to be euthanized, this time in Grand Teton National Park less than a month ago and not far away from where the incident, above, occurred. Here's the press release Grand Teton sent out on July 19, 2006:

For more information, contact: Joan Anzelmo/Jackie Skaggs
(307)739-3415 or (307)739-3393
________________________________________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 19, 2006 06-36

Food-Conditioned Black Bear Euthanized in Grand Teton National Park

Superintendent Mary Gibson Scott announced that park biologists euthanized a 5-year-old male black bear today out of concern for public safety. This bear, and a 3-year-old female, have been frequenting the Colter Bay campground, RV Park, swim beach, and picnic area. During the past two
weeks, both bears have repeatedly obtained food and garbage from park visitors. Due to the repeated food rewards, habituation to people, and increasingly bold behavior exhibited by the male bear, park officials made the difficult decision to remove it from the population, eliminating potential threats to visitors.

The 178-pound male black bear was captured in a research trap during July of 2005, when biologists were locating specific bears for the purpose of collecting research data. Although the bear received an identification tag at that time, he was not radio collared. The female black bear, also frequenting areas around Colter Bay, is wearing a radio collar. She has been exhibiting the same behavior as the male bear, and park biologists will be closely monitoring her activities.

Park officials remind visitors that disposing of garbage and storing food properly is extremely important – often a life or death situation. Human carelessness doesn’t just endanger people; it can also result in a bear’s death. Once a bear acquires human food, it often loses its fear of people and can become habituated and sometimes dangerous.

Bears are active in areas of high visitor use, as well as in the
backcountry. For the health and safety of bears, as well as that of park visitors, please adhere to the following rules:

· Never leave food or backpacks unattended, even for a minute.
· Use available storage facilities when camping, or secure food in your car.
· Dispose of garbage in bear-proof garbage cans, provided at all campgrounds.
· When camping in the backcountry, hang food and scented items using the counter-balance method.
· Never run from a bear, and do not drop your backpack if a bearcharges you.

Detailed information about how to behave in bear country is available at park visitor centers and ranger stations. Please take the time to educate yourself about bear safety before enjoying the park.

-NPS-

Once again a "problem" bear is taken care of when it was the human at fault. I'm reminded of the story for which Michael Frome was fired from his writing post with Defenders of Wildlife's magazine. In his article, Frome defended a bear that managers at Mesa Verde NP decided to euthanize because it too had become a "problem."
It is hardly a surprise how little the modern park visitor seems to have matured when it comes to dealing with megafauna like bears and bison and moose and elk.
And it's a damn shame, too.

Referring back to Grizzly 141, I was initially saddened and upset to hear about this bear being put down right in West and I am still in agreement that people absolutely must be educated to not habituate any bear or treat any animal cruelly. However, after getting concerned enough to make some phone calls and get more information, I learned that this bear was, according to the information I got, at least 20 years old, with worn and decayed back teeth, cracked canines, and what seemed to be a case of arthritis. Converting bear years to human years and assuming my information is accurate, this old boar was getting pretty old for a wild bear, equivalent to a hardliving man well into his 70s, and all the more cranky and dangerous because of the chronic pain and discomfort of age and medical deterioration. Given his age and condition, removing this older boar, as opposed to a younger boar or sow, will actually do minimal harm to the overall population dynamics and will keep him from having to deal with another Yellowstone winter nursing bad teeth and stiff joints. It's still sad; but, the 4 year old boar hit on the highway recently was a lot sadder and any loss of a sow is worst of all.

todd,

What i find extremely distressing about the entire situation with bear/human encounters is the lack of punishment meted out to the person who leaves food readily available to these bears, who are opportunistic feeders.

About four years ago, bear 101, a 20 year old sow griz with two cubs of the year, was captured and placed in our bear jail (grizzly discovery center) after a fourth generation Montana outfitter and guide left food out and available for three consecutive days/nights, despite warnings from our former game warden ... when i confronted the game warden about why the person wasn't fined after the first warning, he stated "we have discretion" in meting out fines ... he added that "atleast we didn't kill her" ... As hibernation time came around i was obsessed about this bear, feeling that she had indeed been killed by authorities who turned her from a WILD bear into local "entertainment" ... bear 101 was so clinically depressed that she is now never let outside to the public's view.

I have two suggestions for dealing with people who move into grizzly habitat and show a total lack of understanding of these bears.

First, if after an initial warning notice in writing, we slapped a heavy fine, say $3,000-$5000 on the person, that would get the attention of the WHOLE neighborhood, who would see we are serious about protecting bears from people who are essentially engaged in baiting bears, which is against Montana law ... maybe that would get them to properly store food, garbage, bird feed, etc.


If that's considered too harsh, maybe we could dart, collar, ear-tag and lip-tattoo the offending person (which we now do to bears on their first "offense") ... if they continue to bait bears, we could relocate them to Iowa where they don't have to worry about living with WILDlife!

barb abramo
west yellowstone

It's too bad, but if Mike is right about the bear's age and health, he may not have made it through the winter and may have become dangerous before that time. It seems that many of the bear attacks are by bears that are hungry and can't fend for themselves on nature food like they use to be able to. I seem to remember a few years ago that there was a news report of bears starving and dying in BC. I believe these bears had become habituated to the fish processing villiages along the coast. When there was a lean salmon year there wasn't the discarded carcuses for the bears to eat. We have coyotes that live in suburban areas. We have waterfowl that nolonger migrate according to the seasons because of ready access to urban ponds and sources of food. As our poplulation continues to grow there will be even more encounters that lead to habituation of wildlife.

Why do people do stupid things like feeding bears? I guess the answer is a combination of responses. Partly, it might be to see a wild animal respond to their effort of interaction. Another might be the "get stuffed" attitude expressed in so many ways such as the defiance of litter laws. Look at the roadsides and all the trash discarded from vehicles. Light cigarettes thrown from vehicles especially during fire season. If only 10% of our fellow citizens act with defiant stupidity it often seems like well over 50% given the outcome. Perhaps an environment course taught throughout the gradeschool years might be the answer to get the right reflex response.

Even in New Mexico the sent of Fresh cooking Spam in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains brought forth a Bear to tear open the screen door of a elderly women who lived alone. Needly to say one swipe from that Black Bear brought death to that widower. He finished the spam dinner and proceed back up the mountain.
You are what you eat...Feed an animal and they will love you and always come back to the convient source. So think before you react to the creatures of the earth..:)

I am hoping my reaction to the above posts is NOT "misery loves company". It is refreshing, I must admit, to read the well-placed indignation of the paragraphs above, well-placed in that it is directed towards members of our own species. Ms. Abramo, I have long wondered about how it could be that people I logically expect to know better make the "mistakes" they do; I have had a lurking and nauseating suspicion that those who certainly know better, the "fourth generation Montana outfitter and guide" you mention above being a beautiful example, are guilty of "slip-ups" of sane and sensible food containment NOT by default, but by design. Ah, the human mind: until we can traipse back in time to a point where we come to see ourselves as entitled OR as obligated and agree amongst ourselves to commit to an attitude of obligation, I fear that a sense of entitlement will prevail as human beings, though placing themselves in the homes of nonhuman animals, insist on contuining in their human ways that, plain and simple, are maladaptive behaviors for their consciously-chosen environments. I just don't get how we don't get it.

Craig Moore, I agree wholeheartedly with you that it is likely human beings are keen on seeing how a wild animal might respond to our attempts at interaction with them. I am thinking that if bears looked like snakes we might not be so drawn to them, drawn to extracting a response from them that we can construe as our having made a connection with their bearness, that we have perhaps begun a relationship of reciprocity and friendship with a creature still inscrutable to us. We don't know what bears think about or how they order their perceptions of the world they encounter. We cannot know how a bear makes use of what he or she stores in his or her memory or even what it is they remember. Yes, it does seem they have a phenemonal mental Rolodex, as it were, of what foods are where but I wonder what else they remember and recall and what happens in a bear's life to trigger memories.

I have of late been on the receiving end of e-mails about bears being killed here, there, and everywhere and I wish for the impossible: That is, if we human beings will not alter our behaviors to accommodate the different ways nonhuman animals have of being in the world, then those of us who feel the pain bears suffer in the imbalance of bear-human equation really do need to "Learn to Talk Bear" and get word out to this singularly charismatic animal to see not food but pretty much a time bomb that starts ticking the moment they even approach human food.

Does anybody else harbor fantasies of cordoning off tracts--the vaster, the better--of land, rich and prime habitat for bears--and simply not allowing, yes, NOT ALLOWING human beings in? We have such an array of options when choosing where to live and spend our leisure time; do bears have the same options? Umm, gee, not that I have heard.

Today our local weekly newspaper carried an article about the grizzly killed earlier this week ... it noted that after an initial written warning, a person COULD be fined $75! So that's the value of a griz. The article did not specify that the persons leaving food garbage in their garage were actually fined anything.

here's the link:
http://westyellowstonenews.com/articles/2006/08/18/news/news1.txt

In a letter to the editor, which is not posted online, Joanne Stovall suggested removing the person, not the griz ... good old Joanne, who in her 80s is still fighting for the rights of WILDlife ... she has been a resident of Horse Butte for over 45 years.

barb abramo
west yellowstone

Before one can make the assumption that the bear was "habituated" to human food, we need to look at what caused it to come so close to humans, had it ever been in trouble before?
I suggest that bears with their keen sense of smell are aware of humans and human food all of the time, from the back country camper cooking his skillet of tofu, to the barbeque grill in Mammoth, and the restaraunts in any place in the GYA. As the area becomes more and more filled with predators, the very old and weak are going to try to find a food source shunned by the competetion.
It may be time to actually study how many predators the area can safely hold without having some starve to death or get into trouble like this bear. We are all responsible for the situation, not just those who live in an area. We are the ones insisting on more predators than natural resources can feed.

I agree with much of what you've written. But I think it's unfair to just come out with a blanket statement intimating that there are now predators on the ground (and in the air too, I presume) than there is prey for them to eat (not consume, like us "consumers"). Where is the science supporting your assertion?
In any case, all Americans, past and present, bear responsibility at some level for what has happened to wildlife populations. Those whose habitats are restrictive, like the Cerulean Warbler, have suffered, while generalists like the White-tailed Deer are numerous beyond comprehension in most Eastern states. There is, for example, an estimated 1.6 million whitetails eating away at what's left of the forests in Pennsylvania. 50,000 to 60,000 are killed on the state's highways every year. Nurserymen, fruit growers, suburban gardeners and automobile insurers are crying for relief. And we, through boneheaded management, are responsible.

You put your finger exactly on the big part of the problem, there are absolutely no studies that show how many predators the area can support. Dr. Charles Kay filed freedom of information to obtain records to determine how they decided on the number of wolves to bring in, there were none.
Right now the feds want a guarantee from my state of Wyoming that we will always maintain 8 packs of wolves in Yellowstone and 7 in the remainder of the state. Yet there is no study, nothing to indicate that there is enough prey base in Yellowstone to feed 8 packs (must have at least 6 members to qualify as a pack), plus a few hundred griz, black bears, some cougars and coyotes...as well as the winged predators you mentioned, over the long haul. We already know the elk numbers have plummeted, all but two trumpeter swans were gone by this spring, and I don't know if even they have survived since. There certainly is no indication that there were ever predators on that scale in Yellowstone.
So yes I would say there is every indication that the system is overloaded with predators, and just because someone wants them there doesn't mean there is enough food for them, so they will go find it where they can.

Whenever I read an article about a bear that was killed by people chumming for bears, I'm reminded that park residents in Yellowstone and Glacier do a great job of living with bears. I don't know what the legal consequences would be if a park ranger living at Old Faithful failed to secure his or her garbage from bears, but such irresponsible behavior would make you a social outcast. What communities in bear country need is the attitude that feeding bears is socially unacceptable.

Again, I'd like to remind you that there is no evidence of "chumming". This was an old bear, I don't believe it had a history of hanging around residences, and it was hungry.
Elk in Yellowstone used to be counted in the hundreds or even thousands, now if you see them, it will be in tens or even singles. No swans left, only an occasional moose. Now I don't care what kind of denial a person is in that correlates very strongly with the tremendous increase in predators the last 10 years. The griz have been steadily increasing and of course we went from a few resident wolves to about a hundred and fifty minimum, which is more than were taken out of Yellowstone over a 42 year period to "extirpate" them.
It seems it might help to keep griz in the back country by closing all of the Yellowstone back country sites and leave that area to the wildlife. It seems to me that anything cooked over a campfire is going to carry the smell further than the smell of birdseed, which is the politically correct culprit blamed.

It is really sad to read how easy it is to turn people's mistakes and lack of care into bears' fault. The facts are plain and simple: people in Horse Butte left some food/garbage out and the bear helped himself. If that food source was not readily available , perhaps he would have just walked through West and went on to eat some natural foods. There are old and toothless bears that live and die in the ecosystem without getting into trouble with humans. Same goes for the black bear that was "removed" from Colter Bay: if people did not leave honey glazed hams et similia outside of their tents he would still be alive and gone to eat ants and huckleberries.
Bears are not the problem, we are the problem: their ability to survive and thrive in the ecosystem depends on us understanding that we cannot live and and act as we please. Fertilized lawns and birdfeeders may belong in the suburbs of LA or New York but not in the 5 acre subdivision outside of Yellowstone Park (and yes grain from feeders attracts bears alone, I witnessed that firsthand just as grain that falls on the railtracks not far from Banff attracts and kills grizzlies).
So yes I agree that higher fines for food storage violations should be in place as well as education at all levels. We can all make mistakes, admitting them and learning from them (instead of blaming the critters) is the right step towards looking at predators such as bears what makes parts of Montana and Wyoming so special.

This should not have to happen.

Sad story that doesn't have to happen...ignorant,stupid people.