For the second time this summer a black bear in Yellowstone National Park has been put down for developing too great a taste for human food. Park officials say the bear was killed Thursday after breaking into the backpacks of a "large group" of hikers.
What park officials can't yet say is whether anyone was cited for poor food handling. The spate of bears that have been euthanized in recent years begs the question of how humans who played a role in habituating the bruins to human foods were reprimanded.
Traveler has made inquiries to parks where bear incidents have gained visibility -- Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Sequoia, Yosemite and Denali -- both last year and in recent weeks and has had mixed responses. In Sequoia officials say they fortunately haven't had many problem bears, while in Denali they say only two wildlife-related citations were handed out to park visitors during 2007. In Grand Teton, more than 100 citations and warnings were handed out last year.
Backcountry -- and even front-country -- travelers in these parks should certainly be well-aware of how to stay safe in bear country, and how to keep bears from becoming used to human foods. In Yellowstone, for instance, hikers who are spending one or more nights in the backcountry must sit through a video that runs about 15 minutes and highlights how to keep a clean camp, how to store your foods, and what to do if you encounter a bear.
That informational process begs the question of how the latest black bear to die was able to rip "into into the packs of a large group of backcountry hikers"? Where were the hikers at the time? Had they properly stashed their packs?
According to Yellowstone officials, the 130-pound sub-adult male bear was killed because it posed a continuing threat to the safety of park visitors and employees. There have been multiple incidents involving this bear damaging property and obtaining human foods in the Hellroaring and Yellowstone River drainages in the north end of the park.
Repeated efforts to trap the bear were unsuccessful. Late Thursday afternoon, however, park staff caught the bear rooting through the backpacks.
"Based on his aggressive behavior, lack of fear of people, and its success at getting human food, the decision was made to immediately euthanize the bear," said park officials. "The area was cleared of all visitors and the bear was shot."
In Yellowstone regulations require you to stay a hundred yards – the length of a football field – away from black and grizzly bears at all times. When not in use, food, garbage, barbecue grills and other attractants must be stored in hard-sided vehicles or bear-proof food storage boxes or hung at least 10 feet above the ground and 4 feet out from the trunk of the tree.
Due to deep snows last winter, in combination with the very late spring we experienced this year, many bears are in poor shape making it more likely that they will seek human foods. Once bears become conditioned to human foods they are much more likely to damage property and injure people in their efforts to obtain human foods.
Comments
With the experience per say that the NAtl parks have you would think that they could of caught this bear and tame it for it wildlife habitat or put it in a local zoo?I'am pretty sure most people that visits our parks today out side of the old school people are lame.dumb,and stupid.and don't take the necessary percautions when thier out in the wilderness.there should be required trainning before any gusts is allowed into these areas to provide safety and security for both nature and its dumb friends todays humans who have no brain cells left to think about anything.except of course their next meal!
It is not only the visitors that need to be educated, but the staff. I stayed at White Wolf campground a few summers ago, and the camphost left out eggs to entice the bears to the campsite his niece was staying at. It angered me, we had bears in the camp all night, people yelling and banging pots & pans, so much for the tranquility of nature. Also, you can not tame a wild animal and/or put it in a zoo. We all need to be more aware and responsible when camping/hiking.
We just got back from Glacier and the information regarding bears is in the information handed out - but many people don't seem to read it. While we were there, a back country campsite was closed due to a bear shredding a tent. We never heard if there was food or something in the tent but it seems likely that there was something in there that shouldn't have been. We ran into several people who were backpacking and had to revise their plans due to this campsite being closed. If people don't follow proper procedure, they ruin experiences for others. We have been trying to hike the Iceberg Lake trail and the Cracker Lake trail for several years but the trails are always closed due to bear activity when we are in the park. We were finally successful this year - both trails were still open. We were on the Iceberg Lake trail when we were approaching a bend in the trail where we couldn't see the rest of the trail. We made sure to make loud noises only to be hushed by a couple on the other side who were bird watching!! They told us we were scaring away the birds!! No wonder the trails get closed. They were quietly going up the trail as they figured there were plenty of people on the trail that they didn't need to make noise. Another couple we talked to said that they had seen a lady and her group chasing after a bear for a photo because they had bear spray if they needed it. We have hiked 100 miles each summer the last few years and never saw a bear - and also ran into many people who don't make noise at the appropriate times on the trail and others that seem to lack good judgement. (I am sure you could hear endless stories!!) Last year we were in the Canadian Rockies and a man was hiking by himself and not making noise and he came across a mama and cubs and he was charged by the bear. More could be done to educate the casual hikers and visitors to these parks. You can hand them the information but can't make them read it, and not everyone seems to have common sense!
First of all, if you want to impress the public with your comment, then use some punctuation, check your grammar, capitalization and spelling!!!
Had you read the article with any comprehension you would have seen that the hikers are required to watch a 15 minute video on proper food safety in bear county. Hang it 10 feet high and 4 feet out. I imagine these hikers just took their packs off, laid them down and wandered away for a bit, thinking it would never happen to them. YES, that was dumb, but so is the attitude of rehabilitating a bear (are you kidding?), especially when the bear population is expanding into populated areas.
(This comment was edited to remove unnecessary personal attacks.)
Hello the bears were here first!!! if there is a problem with bears getting a taste for human food then the number of hikers per day should be cut down, and a limited amount,and type of food regulated per person.I do not see the sense in shooting a bear for the reason of finding food ,this is their territory.If anything else small game for them to eat should be bred and distributed in the part so it can breed and feed the bears.Whatever bear eat,im sure they like their kind of food better first off.
But what happens to the bears if they don't have the habitat protections of a national park?
There are some parts of Yellowstone that are simply off-limits to humans so as not to interfere with grizzlies. Should more limits be instituted?
Kurt asks:
Black bears thrive in many parts of North America, without exclusionary habitat protection - without prohibiting human access. Black bears share the landscape with humans across much of our rural terrain. Nothing bad is happening to these populations, due to lack of human-excluding protections (on the contrary!).
Grizzlies are at least a bit different case, yes, but experience in Alaska encourages us to hope that cohabitation - sharing the land - is not so unreasonable in their case either.
The essential difference with grizzlies in Alaska, and in many rural conterminous regions with black bear, is that they are hunted. When bear are hunted, the cubs are taught that humans are to be avoided. This probably lasts for at least a few generations after the last negative experience with humans. It is not necessary to reduce the population (it is not even necessary that the hunting be fatal or injurious). In fact, they can actually overpopulate and still remain very wary of humans, if even light hunting activity continues.
But when all hunting-conditioning ceases, then we have what is observed in the high country of the Olympic National Park: bears begin to regard humans as an inert feature on the landscape. They have no fear or concern about us. The question is, is this the final, stable state in the bears' changing response to humans?
The sad answer is, not likely. Instead, bears will (individually, at first) continue to 'probe the resource' - meaning humans, and everything about them. They will push & explore the envelope, and this will lead to outcomes that will not be accepted. If a bear learns a valuable behavior - through human negligence or its own insistent investigations - and that animal reproduces, it will one day take the young to teach them what it has found to be of value.
Wildlife managers across America are now to some degree sitting on a powder keg, with respect to bear & cougar that are insufficiently wary of humans. Exactly to what degree and how long & fast the fuse might be, is the subject of much speculation & disagreement.
We do bears no favors, to let them reach a state in which they languidly lick blueberries while we fill our cameras. Just as it is our responsibility to instruct our pets that highways and automobiles are dangerous, the same ethic really applies to the conditioning of wild carnivores, that humans are the dominant predator the world over, and that to regard them in any other way - as a potential resource - is a dire mistake.
Ultimately, if we exclude all humans from Parks, in the hopes that bears will not have to be trained to fear humans, they will naturally disperse beyond the Parks and begin spreading across the country, unaware that humans are different from any other medium-sized mammal.
Yellowstone Park killed this most recent desensitized bear in hopes to forestall a more general outbreak of similar behavior. If it becomes evident that a free population of bears of unknown extent & distribution has adopted the same psychological stance toward people, then wildlife managers will likely be obliged to eradicate the entire population from some more or less large region.
That is the powder keg that the Rangers were trying to contain, when they saw what this 130 pound subadult male black bear was doing.
The underlying source of the problem is less that humans carry food on their backs, than that humans have chosen to treat bears as inert objects upon the landscape ... whereupon they have learned to reciprocate the attitude. Neither animal is inert, and to assume so is a possibly very expensive fallacy.
What we have in some protected ecosystems today is uncomfortably close to an open-air version of Siegfried & Roy.
Thank you Beamis - I appreciate your encouragement!
I am a little red, and a little green, unacceptably liberal, and disgustingly conservative. But I've been handicapped & disfigured this way for a long time, and it doesn't really bother me much anymore. ;-)
I saw right away that the National Park Traveler is an exceptionally well-done resource, populated by folks who respond in kind to Kurt Repanshek's quality efforts. I look forward to participating more.
This weekend I have a family reunion to attend (another specie of open-air zoo!), but look to returning in a few days!