I grew up north of Yellowstone National Park in the days when there was a set of grandstands at the garbage dump behind Old Faithful Lodge where people would gather to watch the bears come to the dump to feed. It was common, in those days, for people to feed bears from their cars. The bears, mostly black bears, would line up near the roads waiting for handouts from tourists. On Saturday mornings we would watch The Adventures of Yogi Bear on the cartoons. Yogi and his side kick, Boo Boo would seal picnic baskets from tourists in Jellystone Park. We got the reference. We had seen plenty of bears feasting on human food with our own eyes.

After a handful of tourists were injured by bears, mostly from doing really stupid things like trying to photograph their children with bears, the National Park Service began to move the bears away from the places where there were people. A program of trapping and relocating bears was initiated. In the process, some of the bears were fitted with radio collars and one of my father’s Super Cub airplanes was fitted with a tracking antenna. The system wasn’t terribly effective. The pilot had to search for the bear from the air because the signals from the collars didn’t travel very far. But it didn’t take long to see a pattern. We learned where the bears would be. They’d be trucked up near the Slough Creek Divide and unloaded. From there they would slowly make their way back into the park toward the tourist areas.

Black bears that have been trapped learn to avoid culvert traps. After being trapped a few times, the bears would sniff around the traps, but wouldn’t go in even when they were baited with fresh food. The dump at Old Faithful was shut down. The Yellowstone Park Company began trucking garbage out of the park to landfills in other areas. The bleachers were removed. After several years people stopped seeing so many bears in the park. Towns outside of the park began to sell t-shirts with slogans like, “Montana scoreboard: Bears 6, Humans 0.” We thought it was funny. We enjoyed making fun of tourists.

I’ve been thinking about those days a bit. I was young and I really didn’t understand all of the dynamics. I thought we knew how to deal with bears. We knew about keeping food away from our campsites, raising food in bear safe hanging containers, making noise on the trail, and avoiding close contact with bears in the wild. The truth, however, was that we lived in a place with very few people where there was room for the bears. The world has changed. There are a lot more people who live in close proximity to bears these days.

About a year ago a bear was euthanized by State Fish and Game officials not far from Bellingham. The bear had injured a man who was running on a trail near a popular lake where we have walked. The images of the bear after it had been killed were run on a local news web site. Human-bear encounters are still relatively rare in the North Cascades near our home, but if you go north a bit they are very common.

Officials in British Columbia, the province just north of our home, have received over 6,000 calls concerning human-bear encounters this year. More than 150 black bears have been killed by BC Conservations Officer Service so far this year. According to one report I read, B.C. Conservation Service killed 4,279 black bears between 2015 and 2022. Black bears are often killed when they begin spending time in human-dense areas seeking unnatural food sources. People often leave garbage in areas that are easily accessible to bears and when the bears learn about the easy food sources they return over and over to the same places. After all, they are on a mission to consume as many calories as possible in the fall before they settle in for hibernation. Bears don’t eat all winter long and have to live on fat stores from summer’s eating binges. Access to garbage for black bears is far too easy in many areas.

Human bear encounters are not the result of a spike in bear populations, but rather increasing expansion of human communities into the bears’ natural habitat.

As the National Park Service learned at Yellowstone National Park in the 1950s an 1960s, when it comes to human-bear encounters it is easier to decrease bear populations and move them away from areas frequented by humans than to teach humans common sense rules about bears. Those rules are fairly simple:
Do not feed bears.
Do not run or climb a tree. Do not scream, turn your back on a bear, kneel or make eye contact.
Keep away from bears. Make sure they have a clear escape route.
Stick together. Hike in groups. Make lots of noise to announce your presence in bear country.

Story after story, however, report humans who simply don’t know or follow those simple rules. Food and food smells are left out around camp sites. Runners continue to exercise alone in areas where bears have been sighted. People try to capture pictures and video of bears on their cell phones when they could simply go indoors for safety.

I enjoy living in places where there are plenty of non human neighbors. I enjoy the occasional opportunity to watch a black bear from the safety of our car on an isolated mountain road. I live in a dense neighborhood where bears don’t venture and we feel safe in our back yard. It makes me sad each time I read of another human-bear encounter that ends up with another bear killed. I wish we could learn better how to live with our wild neighbors. But I’ve lived in bear country enough to expect that humans will continue to behave in ways that are dangerous for bears.

I wonder if it would work to use old ineffective bear traps as temporary storage areas for garbage. I’ve never heard of anyone trying that. The truth is that I don’t have any ideas that are better than those employed by conservation officers and I suspect that they will continue to be forced to euthanize bears at a high rate.