Living with black bears

What is it like to live in a town that has black bears in its midst? Why do black bears attack people, and what do we need to do keep bears safe from us?

It's a hot afternoon in a village on the British Columbian coast. A local lady leaves her kitchen door open, the scent from her cooking drifting out in the forest. Further down the road, a tourist throws some orange peel out of a car window, while a fisherman puts salmon offal in a trash can.

A young bear is wandering by on the edge of the forest, as it does most days. It is looking for food that it can obtain easily because it needs to put on enough weight to survive this winter's hibernation. And it noses inside the house. It eats pet food left unattended; it is quite unaware that the home owner is just in the next room.

Suddenly, she opens the kitchen door. The bear panics - it is very nervous of people, like the vast majority of its kind. It bolts for the door and runs back to the forest, but it has learnt that there is a food source in that house, and it is too intelligent to forget. Later that evening, it cautiously returns, scratching at the door. A dog barks, and it flees again.

But it is now thought of as a "problem bear". A wheeled trap will be set, baited with food. The bear will be caught, the trap hitched to the policeman's van and towed out of town, and there the bear will be shot, its carcass left in the landfill.

Common sense and common conflicts

This scene is played out hundreds of times each year in Canada. Sadly, many bears die after becoming ensnared by easily preventable conflicts - the bear-proof bin in the photo was left in this state for a week in Strathcona Provincial Park.

Bears have no choice but to be bears, but we as humans have the ability to make minor changes to our behaviour. If that means taking trash home rather than throwing it in an overflowing garbage bin, or feeding pets behind closed doors, or fishing responsibly, then that is what we should do.

I spent the summer of 2007 in a Vancouver Island village right on the front line of human-wildlife interactions, interviewing the local people and watching the local bear population being killed off by the police one by one.

It is a peculiarly thorny issue because many people do genuinely fear bears. There is very little evidence that a black bear that eats trash in a landfill is more likely to kill people than a wilderness bear, but the idea is there, and emotions often run high. When viewed objectively, black bears are amongst the easiest of the world's large carnivores to have in the neighbourhood.

Why do black bears attack?

Bears that bite people rather than trying to kill them are often those who have been offered handouts in campgrounds in national parks, and become beggars, actively approaching people for more. Feeding wild mammals is illegal in parks for good reason, and those who flout this law should remember that they are putting the animal at high risk of being killed as a public safety measure.

On extremely rare occasions, black bears do kill people. But scientists who have studied the circumstances of these tragedies point to a picture very different from that portrayed in the literature, even that provided in national parks. The confusion is partly due to an assumption that black bears behave in the same way as their larger grizzly cousins, which they clearly do not.

Should we be afraid?

Professor Lynn Rogers, the US' foremost bear expert, says that being out in the woods with black bears is actually one of the safest places that you can be. The vast majority of bear sightings are non-threatening, although I do carry bear spray as a precaution when hiking in bear country, for much the same reason that I wear a seatbelt when in a car; I don't anticipate ever having to rely on either, but they are good to have nonetheless.

To my mind, black bears are much like dogs - most cause no harm to people at all, a few develop nuisance behaviours, and a very few are lethally dangerous. But, statistically, dogs are far more dangerous than bears. In the USA alone, dogs bite 4,700,000 people each year, killing twenty to thirty of them.

We should not be paranoid about black bears - or indeed any wild creature. We do need to consider sensibly and calmly what measures we need to take to co-exist. The status quo of bears dying by the hundreds when innocently encountering civilisation is a deep stain on Canada's conservation reputation.

All photos, text and other content © Adele Brand (www.thesittingfox.co.uk) 2006 - 2011. Inspired by stuff found at www.webcodingtech.com.