Two things contribute to this:
People no longer automatically shoot/kill every damned thing they see as a threat.
“The primary contributing factor to human-bear conflicts is the presence of easily-accessible food sources near homes and businesses.”
When a black bear wandered in my dog door the state bear people got involved. First thing they did was knock door-to-door begging people to lock their trash cans so they wouldn’t have to euthanize such animals. They tried hard to kill my invader (didn’t catch it!), on the heart-broken advice of the state bear expert for the region.
I live in a town where black bears are everywhere. I had a lot of misconceptions about black bears that I think many people have before coming here.
Black bears should really never need to be put down unless they are “problem bears” (the technical term, as funny as it sounds). They arent inherently aggressive 99% of the time. What can make them develop problem behaviors like you said is having access to garbage, which then develops a pattern of behavior, which when unsuccessful leads them to try and break into peoples houses or (very rarely) get aggressive with people.
They will return to any spot they previously found food, or even just smells of garbage they cant reach. They are so honed in on that behavior pattern that they cant even be distracted by a new source of food sometimes.
I once was walking home at night with two pounds of chicken wings that I could definitely smell with my human nose. A bear crossed the street in front of me and beelined for a trashcan that I see them knock over all the time. Like he could have easily just come for my wings but he was too honed in on the trash can. Thats how pattern based black bears are. Theyre a lot an aloof dog most of the time, attitude-wise. But if they get into bad habits they can turn sour and aggressive. Especially if they ever become accustomed to humans feeding them intentionally.
I think the biggest thing I didnt know is that black bears arent all black. Ive seen ones that are cinnamon colored a couple times
Had no idea there were so strongly hardwired, but I’ve seen similar behavior in my pet pig.
Ex-gf and I were studying about pigs when she read out, “Says here they’re highly food-motivated animals.” I thought that was an inane thing to say, I’m a food motivated animal! Yeah, no, not like pigs.
When my wife and I did some hiking in the Canadian Rockies we had an interesting talk with a park ranger we ran into. He described a problem bear they had to deal with a year earlier by explaining how bears brains are pretty much hard wired to remember food sources and return to them.
The park rangers had determined that this particular bear had either been fed by a hiker with a backpack or had seen a backpacker accidentally drop some food. Whichever the case was, this bear would only accost people with backpacks along a specific section of trail. If you didn’t have a backpack the bear would leave you alone. But if you had one then the bear would come up looking for food.
The rangers tried multiple things to discourage the bear. They sprayed it with bear repellant when it approached. They shot it with beanbags when it approached, etc. Eventually they tranquilized it and moved it something like 100 miles away to a different part of the Rockies. It always returned to the same location and continued to harass hikers with backpacks.
They eventually made the difficult decision to kill the bear before it mauled any hikers…
Its truly sad when they get hardwired into problem behaviors like that. You just reminded me of that other fact that even when relocated they will almost always make it all the way back. The last few problem bears they relocated from here came all the way back again, across 3 mountain ranges.
Really relocating them just prolongs the suffering of the bear. Hopefully scientists could someday create some kind of bear amnesia medicine that would get them to forget the bad behavior pattern without messing them up
Wait, they sent out another investigative reporter to do interviews about the anchor’s cell phone video from his neighborhood? And that somehow turned into national news while stripping out that detail? I find this more interesting than the bear.
Ubear Eats?
