When Man Becomes Prey

by Cat Urbigkit

  From 1931 to 1969, during the period when bears were allowed to feed in open garbage dumps in Yellowstone National Park, black bears injured an average of forty-five park visitors a year, according to bear managers in the park. Bears had learned to associate humans with food, and had become habituated to the presence of humans. The number of such encounters decreased once the garbage dumps were closed in the national park and officials stepped up efforts to reduce bear-human conflicts. Park records indicate that more than 330 “nuisance” black bears were removed (either killed or placed in captivity) from the population in the ten years after the dumps were closed, and human injuries from black bear attacks dropped to about one or two per year.

  California’s Yosemite National Park experienced bear issues similar to Yellowstone’s. In addition to earthen garbage pits, park managers established artificial feeding stations, places where bears were intentionally fed human food scraps at remote locations, to reduce conflicts between black bears and people in the 1930s, according to a paper written by Joseph Madison, published in Human–Wildlife Conflicts. The end result was a very high density of bears in the park, and bears learned to break into vehicles looking for food rewards. Their burglaries became widespread and continued to cause problems until the park finally closed the feeding stations and dumps in the 1970s. Yosemite bears that consistently exhibited aggressive behavior toward humans or entered into cabins or tents were killed by wildlife managers, to the tune of about twenty-four bears a year, according to Madison. Agency managers began an intensive program of aversive conditioning to prod the bears back toward natural avoidance of humans and human developments.

  BLACK BEAR FACTS

  Black bears are large predators with a wide distribution in North America. They are found as far south as Mexico, north through Canada and Alaska, and across the United States. There are at least 750,000 black bears in North America—there may be more than 900,000, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Black bears have varied pelage—from blonde to brown, chocolate-colored, and black. Many black bears have brown muzzles and a white-colored triangle on the upper chest.

  Just as colorations vary, so do weights of black bears. Mature males in the western states average 250 to 300 pounds in midsummer, and females average about 75 pounds less. Pennsylvania officials recorded a 454-pound female black bear, while Minnesota officials recorded a female that weighed in at 520 pounds. Nevada instituted its first regulated hunting season in 2011, and one male harvested weighed more than 700 pounds, with a chest girth of 64 inches. The largest known wild black bear was an 880-pound male from North Carolina. Weights vary by season, age, and food supply.

  The danger posed by fed bears can’t be discounted. In August 2009, a black bear killed a seventy-four-year-old woman who officials believe had been feeding wild black bears near her Ouray, Colorado, home for more than a decade. A male bear weighing nearly 400 pounds was found feeding on the woman’s body and was shot by a law enforcement officer, as was another bear discovered on the property. The woman had fed the bears dog food and scraps through a metal fence she had constructed around her porch, but one of the animals apparently reached through the barricade and grabbed the woman, killing her. Neighbors had complained about the woman’s bear-feeding activities after bears began to break into their homes, apparently seeking the food they were accustomed to receiving from their neighbor.

  Various factors in this fatal attack indicated a situation had developed increasing the risk of an attack: the bear’s loss of fear of humans, the food rewards received by the bear during its encounters with humans, and the bear’s increasingly aggressive behavior. Bear managers repeatedly caution the public that “a fed bear is a dead bear” because of the danger these animals pose, but some members of the public ignore the warnings and feed these big predators anyway, posing risks not just to themselves, but to all their neighbors.

  FALL: A SPECIAL TIME OF YEAR

  Crisp, cool mornings and shorter days in September signal the end of summer, but these also signal the start of a time of frenzied feeding for black bears and grizzly bears. With winter looming ahead, bears need to consume as many calories and pack on as much weight as possible to sustain them through their winter hibernation. This period of binge eating is called hyperphagia, and bears may spend as many as twenty hours a day eating. A black bear will increase its normal 8,000-calories-a-day intake to 20,000 calories a day. During this time, the combination of hungry bears and careless humans can create conflict situations.

  Colorado Parks and Wildlife, for example, cautions that, while black bears don’t typically attack humans, “they are large, powerful animals and their determination to eat makes them dangerous when they learn human items and places are a source of food.”

  When the Bear Doesn’t Run Away

  Bear behavior varies during human encounters. In some cases, the bear flees. In other cases, the bear may adopt a defensive threat behavior in which it swats the ground with its front paws, loudly clacks its teeth, and bluff charges (charges forward but stops short of making contact). During these defensive behaviors, a bear often vocalizes, with the sounds varying from huffing and snorting to growling. These threat behaviors rarely end with a physical attack, so long as the bear is given plenty of space and doesn’t feel further pressured.

  Black bear predatory behavior directed toward humans has little similarity to bear defensive behavior. With predatory behavior, the bear generally does not conduct threatening displays such as teeth clacking, bluff charging, or vocalizations. A black bear in predatory hunting mode will search out, follow, hunt, or stalk the subject of its interest, and will launch into a full assault, slashing with its paws and teeth. A black bear exhibiting predatory behavior may drag its prey (or victim), feed upon it, bury it, or guard it.

  Bear attack expert Stephen Herrero of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, led a group of scientists in an examination of fatal black bear attacks on humans, resulting in the publication of a 2011 paper in the Journal of Wildlife Management. The paper provided information about the predatory behavior exhibited by these animals, noting that once predatory behavior is initiated, it may persist for hours unless it is deterred. They found that after one person has been killed by a black bear, the bear may attempt or succeed in killing other nearby people. “Such bears appear to be strongly motivated, as if a switch had been thrown,” the researchers wrote. “Once a black bear has killed a person, there is an increased chance that it will try to kill other people.”

  Recent black bear attacks in Tennessee reveal the apparent randomness of some such events—and the terrifying reality when a black bear looks at humans as prey. In May 2000, fifty-year-old Glenda Ann Bradley was hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and was killed in what wildlife officials called an unprovoked attack. Separated from her hiking partner for a short time while he fished, he came back to find Bradley already dead, with a 112-pound female bear standing over her body, with a yearling cub at its side. The adult bear behaved aggressively and would not back down, and both of the animals fed on the woman’s body. About a dozen hikers and campers arrived on the grisly scene and threw rocks at the bear and yelled at it for several hours until park rangers arrived with firearms and killed both bears.

  Bears inside national parks are fully protected from persecution, and are not generally subject to human harassment or hunting pressure, so they have little, if any, reason to fear humans. The bear that killed Bradley had previously been captured and marked for research purposes, but it was not known as a nuisance bear, and it was not known to be food-conditioned.

  Bear expert Herrero, discussing the bear’s clearly predatory behavior in the Tennessee attack, stated, “This stalking behavior is very different from the normal aggressive display of a bear when it wants space.” This bear didn’t want space—it wanted its meal.

  One afternoon in April 2006, a family was mauled by a black bear in Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest. A black b
ear raced down a ridge to attack a two-year-old boy as the family played in a pool near a waterfall. The mother was mauled and dragged away while saving her son, and was knocked unconscious during the mauling. When paramedics arrived, the mother returned to consciousness long enough to ask about her children, at which point rescuers realized a child was missing. Her six-year-old daughter had become separated from the family during the ordeal, and had been killed by the bear. The bear was later found and killed. Bear experts determined the attack was unprovoked and predatory.

  In August 2008, eight-year-old Evan Pala from Florida was on a hiking trail with his father in Great Smoky Mountains National Park when a black bear jumped out of the trees and attacked the boy. The father saw the attack, and in turn launched an attack on the bear, as did the boy’s ten-year-old brother. The two managed to pull the bear off Evan, and Evan ran to get away, but stumbled and fell, and the bear pounced again. Evan’s father and brother once again pulled the bear off the boy. Eventually all three members of the family escaped the bear, and all three ultimately recovered from their injuries. The bear was later shot by park rangers after it again behaved aggressively by charging them. The bear weighed 86 pounds—just 25 pounds more than Evan. In this case, the park’s bear population was protected from human harassment and hunting, and the bear showed no demonstrated fear of humans.

  Attacks by Healthy Males Are Most Common

  Herrero and his research team examined fatal attacks on humans by black bears from 1900 through 2009. They found at least sixty-three people had been killed by wild black bears during that period. These attacks were not by rabid animals, but instead were inflicted by healthy bears.

  During this time, people of all ages were killed by bears, not just the very young, small, or older people, as many would assume. Those killed included both men and women. Although it is assumed that a female black bear with cubs may be more dangerous, in reality, the majority of the fatal attacks on humans involved male bears, and most attacks took place during the daylight hours.

  Less than 40 percent of fatal black bear attacks on humans in North America in the last 200 years involved bears that had encountered human food or garbage near the attack site, and few of the bears involved in fatal attacks were known to have a history of association with people. This indicates the animals may view humans as prey. It’s also worth noting that in none of the fatal encounters during this time period did the victims use bear pepper spray to defend themselves.

  Predatory Attacks Can Be Made by Either Sex

  In one of the most disturbing black bear attacks ever recorded, federal geologist Cynthia Dusel-Bacon was mauled while working alone in a remote location in Alaska in August 1977. A black bear erupted out of the brush and came toward Dusel-Bacon, but she stood her ground, shouting loudly at the bear, waving her arms and clapping, being noisy as she tried to scare the bear away. Instead of running away, the bear stalked toward her and attacked. Dusel-Bacon found herself facedown on the ground and played dead. The bear continued to maul the woman and dragged her into the brush, stopping now and then to rest in the 30-minute ordeal. Dusel-Bacon managed to call out on her radio that she needed help, that a bear was eating her. The bear resumed biting her and tore into her backpack for her lunch after savagely mauling both her arms. Eventually a helicopter came in for the rescue, frightening the bear away. Dusel-Bacon was unable to move her arms, so all she could do to signal the helicopter that she was alive was kick her legs. She was flown out of the bush and into emergency surgery, but her left arm had to be amputated at the elbow, and her entire right arm was amputated. Dusel-Bacon had other wounds that took a long time to heal, where the bear had eaten her flesh, but eventually she was released from the hospital. This inspiring woman returned to her work for the US Geological Survey after being fitted with artificial limbs.

  Although an adult female black bear was found and killed near the attack site, there is doubt that this animal was responsible for the mauling. The circumstances indicate that Dusel-Bacon was the victim of a bear that had viewed a human being as prey. Dusel-Bacon indicated she feels she must have startled the sleeping bear, but once the attack began, the bear intended to eat her. She indeed had become prey.

  Multiple Victims

  Even though the risk of a fatal black bear attack is low, the risk does exist. Although most black bear attacks involve single individuals being mauled and killed, in 1978, in Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada, three boys (ages twelve to sixteen) were stalked and killed while fishing. A conservation officer participating in the search for the missing boys came upon the bear, which had gathered the bodies into one spot and covered them with debris, feeding on two of the bodies. The officer shot and killed the nearly 300-pound adult male black bear.

  A predatory black bear killed two people in northern Alberta in 1980. The man and woman were associated with a drilling rig camp nearby and had separately gone out for walks. The man had gone out alone first, and when he didn’t return, the woman and a male companion went out to find him. The couple was attacked by an aggressive black bear, and although the man escaped the attack by climbing a tree and fighting back, the woman was dragged from the tree and killed. Others from the camp arrived on the scene and killed the bear. The body of the male friend they had been seeking out was discovered later, also a victim of the same bear.

  The Higher the Number of Bears, the Higher the Risk

  Researchers have found a correlation between the number of black bears in an area and the risk of fatal attacks on humans. A greater number of bears means greater risk. Thus, when people have more opportunities to encounter bears, the risk of fatal attacks rises.

  Eighty-six percent of fatal attacks on humans by black bears have occurred since 1960, indicating the number of such attacks is increasing. Interestingly, more fatal attacks occurred in Canada and Alaska, even though those areas have a much smaller human population. Herrero and his fellow researchers speculate that the reason is because Canada has less hunting pressure on its bears, which can influence predatory behavior toward humans.

  “With far less hunting pressure, more bold males survive,” according to Herrero.

  So why aren’t even more people killed by black bears? One of the primary reasons is that bears that behave aggressively toward humans, or are involved in attacks on humans, are sought out and killed by wildlife managers. This selective removal helps to eliminate bears with human-aggressive behavior from the gene pool. Just as dog breeders selectively breed dogs to encourage certain characteristics and discourage others, eliminating bears that attack humans from the gene pool may help to “select” against predatory bears.

  In June 2010, a black bear attacked a man hiking with his family one afternoon in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest. Although the man was initially not alarmed when he spotted the bear on the trail behind him, that changed when the bear began deliberately walking toward him. His subsequent attempts to divert the bear’s attention—including dropping items on the ground and retreating—failed. The bear was determined, pursuing the man, biting him on the back of the leg as he tried to get behind a tree. The man was engaged in a battle with the bear when other hikers arrived on the scene and came to his aid, yelling at the bear and throwing objects at it until the bear let the man go. The bear did not retreat, but actually followed the group down the trail before finally disappearing into the forest. Officials evacuated the area and closed it to recreational use, but the bear was not found. This bear, which had exhibited predatory behavior toward humans, was reported to be wearing ear tags, indicating wildlife managers had captured and tagged it at some point in the past.

  Danger in the Dark

  Black bear attacks continue to make headlines in American media, and many of the cases involve bears trying to pull people from their tents in the middle of the night.

  In July 2011, a black bear entered a Colorado campground occupied by hundreds of people gathered for a bow-hunting event and tried to gra
b one of two teenage boys as they slept in a tent. The teenager was able to fight off the bear, although he did receive medical treatment for deep lacerations on one of his legs. State wildlife officials—recognizing the danger of an animal that would enter a tent to attack a sleeping person—used tracking dogs to find the 200-pound adult male black bear, which was then destroyed.

  A month later, the Denver Post reported on three back-to-back bear attacks on humans southwest of Aspen, Colorado. It started when a black bear damaged an unoccupied tent. A few nights later, a bear injured one of two campers sleeping in a tent in a developed campground. A week later, three campers in separate tents were awoken when a black bear tore into one of the tents and began attacking the man sleeping inside. The man fought the bear off as he yelled for help from the other campers. All three men yelled at the bear, which lingered in the area for an extended period of time. The campers hiked out of the area to get the wounded man medical treatment. State and federal wildlife officials using tracking dogs were able to find and kill the adult male black bear suspected in these three attacks.

  It wasn’t just black bears in the western states that were causing problems. In that same month (August 2011), a black bear injured two boys as they slept in tents at a youth camp, with a large group of other campers, in a New Jersey state forest. The camp supervisor managed to get all the boys into a building. The bear remained in the area until a state park officer shot it.