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
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