When Man Becomes Prey

by Cat Urbigkit

  Experts with Colorado Parks and Wildlife recommend that bold coyotes should be treated aggressively. Try to frighten the animal away by shouting and making loud noises. Make aggressive gestures such as waving your arms over your head to appear larger. Throw objects at the animal, or spray it with a hose if one is available nearby. If you are in a group, stand together to appear larger. When you encounter a coyote, scan the area nearby to make sure the coyote is alone and that there is no danger from additional animals. Face the coyote, behave aggressively, and back away or move toward human activity or a building. If a coyote attacks you, fight back as aggressively as possible.

  Bold coyote behavior should be reported to wildlife and public safety officials. Be aware that coyotes are often visible and active during daylight hours, so just seeing a coyote isn’t reason for alarm. Coyotes are especially active from dusk through dawn.

  If a coyote exhibits any sign of illness, such as acting lethargic, staggering, or appears to be having seizures, the animal may be rabid and poses a high risk to human health, so authorities should be contacted immediately. Other diseases affecting coyotes include mange, hepatitis, and distemper—all of which are contagious and can be transmitted either to humans or their pets

  Timm and Baker and their research colleagues identified unusually bold behavior to include a coyote approaching people for food, attacking leashed animals that are accompanied by their owners, chasing joggers or bicyclists, and stalking small children. Coyotes exhibiting these behaviors pose an immediate risk to human safety and should be reported immediately to authorities.

  Try to participate in recreational pursuits in the daylight hours. Take a walking stick with you on walks and hikes, and have a can of animal deterrent spray readily available. If you don’t want to carry noise makers in a pocket or fanny pack, wear a whistle, and consider putting a few rocks in your pocket at the start of a hike so that you won’t have to bend down to pick something up if you encounter a coyote. For some hikers, rocks-in-pockets becomes a routine at the start of every hike. Never discard food on a hike.

  When camping, sleep inside a closed tent, and store food in coolers inside a vehicle.

  Negative reinforcement is advised when dealing with coyotes, and it’s a good idea to haze coyotes wherever you encounter them. Clap your hands, yell “Get! Go away!” or make other loud noises, and throw rocks or sticks—get the message across that coyotes are not welcome near humans. The loss of fear of humans is the bridge that takes a wild coyote into trouble with humans, so push back, for your safety and the welfare of the coyote. A coyote that bites a person must be destroyed.

  Chapter 3

  Gray Wolves

  In summer 2009, thirty-two-year-old Candice Berner, a Pennsylvania native, moved to a remote Alaskan fishing village to work as a special education teacher. The school at Chignik Lake had about seventeen students at the time. Its mascot is a stuffed wolf that sits in a glass case in the lobby of the school.

  “It’s a great reminder of what lurks outside in the wilderness and to be on the alert at all times,” Berner wrote of the wolf mascot in an October 2009 blog entry.

  Berner was soon enjoying her outdoor adventures. As part of one of these adventures, she started a trap line with friends, and was hoping to trap a wolf because she wanted both the fur and the experience.

  Berner loved the outdoors and was described by her dad as “small and mighty.” Just under five feet tall, Berner liked to box (she participated in Golden Gloves boxing), lift weights (she was a powerlifter), and run (she ran marathons). She often took runs late in the afternoons, after school was dismissed for the day.

  On March 8, 2010, Berner took off on an afternoon jog, following the road that connects the village to the nearby airstrip. She was never seen alive again. About 6 p.m., just a few hours after Berner had left on her run, four residents of Chignik Lake were returning to the village on snowmobiles and noticed some blood on the snow-covered road. The blood trail led to the brush where Berner’s body had been dragged and fed upon by the wolves that killed her.

  Investigators examining the tragic scene determined that the attack was predatory—the wolves had attacked and killed Berner as prey. Although she ran and fought the attack, the two or more wolves were much more powerful. Evidence in the snow indicated that one or two wolves chased Berner down the snowy road and attacked her, while a third wolf approached her from above the road, intercepting her effort at escape. Several wolves were located and killed in the area in the next few days.

  The investigative report into the wolf attack on Berner stated, “This appears to have been an aggressive, predatory attack that was relatively short in duration.” Genetic analysis of samples taken from the victim’s clothing and from wolves killed near the attack site “positively identified one wolf and implicated others in the attack.”

  The report noted that, while wolf attacks on humans in North America are rare and poorly understood, “this investigation is the first where DNA evidence has been collected to confirm wolf involvement.”

  Investigators did not find any evidence indicating that wolves had become habituated to or had begun defending local food resources. They found no evidence that indicated biological factors, such as disease, predisposed the wolves to attack. The wolf confirmed to have been involved in the attack appeared healthy and in excellent physical condition.

  The investigative report concluded: “In spite of the findings in this report, wolves are no more dangerous than they were prior to this incident, and people should not be unnecessarily fearful. However people should be mindful of the potential harm that wolves and other wild animals are capable of inflicting and always try to maintain a safe distance from wolves and other wild animals they encounter.”

  Aggressive Behaviors

  The attack on Candice Berner was the second officially recorded human fatality due to wolves in North America in recent years, although numerous incidents of aggressive behavior and attacks have been recorded. In July 2006, a wolf attacked a twenty-five-year-old woman walking along an Alaskan highway. When the woman realized the wolf was approaching her, she ran. The wolf chased her down and bit her legs. The victim survived the attack after seeking shelter in a nearby campground outhouse.

  In April 2000, a radio-collared wolf attacked a six-year-old boy in a logging camp in Alaska and attempted to carry and drag the boy into the forest. Adults rushed to the scene and were assisted by a dog in retrieving the boy from the wolf. According to a report written by Mark McNay and Philip Mooney in The Canadian Field-Naturalist: “The dog bit at the wolf’s hind legs, but the wolf focused on the boy and largely ignored the harassment by both the dog and rescuers. . . . Eventually, when the dog positioned itself between the child and the wolf, a rescuer grabbed the boy and carried him away.”

  The boy in the Alaska attack survived with minor injuries, and the wolf was killed. McNay and Mooney noted: “Until the day of the attack, the collared wolf had never approached or acted aggressively toward people, but it had demonstrated increasingly fearless behavior. The habituation process was probably facilitated by the camp’s central location in the small, isolated area of wolf habitat. The wolf probably encountered people frequently, but people would have been unaware of the wolf’s presence during most encounters, because the camp, road, and sort yard were all surrounded by dense forest. The presence of dogs may have encouraged the wolf to periodically patrol and scent mark along the camp’s perimeter. Company policy made it difficult for camp residents to hunt or trap near the camp or near worksites, thereby creating a de facto wolf protection zone where wolves were not conditioned to avoid humans. That pattern of frequent, low intensity (i.e., passive and inconsequential) encounters, irregularly spaced over a long period, is the ideal recipe for habituation.”

  Wildlife investigators concluded: “The animal’s behavior during the attack clearly contained elements of predation. The wolf was killed shortly after the attack and found to be in normal physical condition; test
s for rabies and canine distemper were negative. Low densities of ungulate prey and increased energetic demands associated with denning may have influenced the wolf’s behavior, but we believe the wolf’s habituation to people was a more significant factor contributing to the attack.”

  Carnegie Tragedy

  Kenton Joel Carnegie wasn’t as lucky when wolves attacked him in November 2005. The twenty-two-year-old engineering student headed out for an afternoon walk in the woods around Points North Landing, a mining camp in Saskatchewan. In the week before Carnegie was killed, two other men encountered and beat back two aggressive wolves near the camp.

  When Carnegie didn’t reappear in camp at the time he was due, searchers headed out in the freshly falling snow and eventually found his partially eaten body. A pack of wolves had killed him. There was suspicion that the wolves had become habituated to humans after feeding at a nearby garbage dump.

  Alaska wildlife biologist Mark McNay compiled information about wolf attacks in Alaska and Canada from 1970 to 2002, finding thirty-nine cases involving aggression toward humans among healthy wolves, with the infliction of numerous human injuries. These cases involved everything from wolves entering campsites and biting the human inhabitants to wolves entering camps to steal human clothing and other items. Some of these cases eventually escalated into attacks on humans. There have also been numerous attacks on pipeline workers in Alaska. In addition, McNay recorded three clear cases of predacious attacks on small children while the children were in the company of other people.

  WOLF BITE

  The biting pressure of a wolf’s jaw is estimated at about 1,500 pounds per square inch (more than twice that of a large dog), according to the Minnesota-based International Wolf Center, allowing the animals to crush a moose femur in just a few bites.

  Predatory Attack Trends

  Mike Jimenez, Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Management and Science Coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, stressed in an interview that predatory attacks on humans by wolves are an extremely rare occurrence.

  To paraphrase Jimenez, “If you look historically, there is lots of evidence of wolves attacking people, but if you put it in perspective, a wolf attack is really a rare event.” He said, “I don’t know of any scientist that thinks that wolves eat people as prey, other than in these rare instances.”

  Predatory attacks on humans usually involve a single wolf or a pack of wolves that appears to have learned that humans are prey. In these cases, victims are often directly attacked, often around the face and neck. In contrast to predatory attacks, a number of investigative attacks have been recorded in North America, in which wolves bite humans after approaching them closely in what is suspected to be testing behavior, or investigating the person as potential prey.

  Five attacks on humans in Canada’s Algonquin Provincial Park between 1987 and 2000 resulted in a new park policy to kill any wolves that show signs of fearlessness toward humans. The offending wolves in the Algonquin attacks had established “regular patterns of fearless behavior” for weeks before the attacks.

  Although the number of wolf attacks on humans in North America may not seem high, wolf attacks around the world have much higher human mortalities. Researchers, led by John Linnell of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, conducted a detailed review of wolf attacks, concluding with publication in 2002 of the paper “The Fear of Wolves: A Review of Wolf Attacks on Humans.” They found reports of wolf attacks resulting in the deaths of 440 people in northern Italy from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. None of the wolves involved had rabies. Linnell’s report noted that sixty-seven people, including fifty-eight children, had been killed by wolves in one Italian valley between 1801 and 1825. Similar attacks occur in other areas, with non-rabid wolves killing more than 200 children in the Hazaribagh region of India between 1980 and 1995, according to Linnell. This region has a long history of wolves killing humans.

  The differences between wolf attacks in North America and in other regions of the world may be explained by differences in how humans treat wolves. Traditionally, humans have persecuted wolves in North America, but in many other regions of the world, wolf hunting has been restricted.

  American wolf biologist Steven Fritts noted: “How wolves react to humans depends on their experience with people. Wolves with little negative experience with people, or wolves that are positively conditioned by feeding . . . may exhibit little fear of humans.”

  Linnell and his research team also noted that wolves “have been so heavily persecuted during the last century that it is highly likely that there has been intense selection against ‘fearless’ wolves or those that are not very shy of humans. In countries where wolves are hunted (legally and illegally) it is unlikely that any will live long once they begin to develop ‘fearless’ behavior.”

  American wildlife managers have recognized that wolves can become habituated to humans and human activities just as readily as bears or mountain lions, but also assert that wolves may not require a consistent pattern of food conditioning before attacks occur. The common thread in all North American wolf attacks involving human injury seems to be a loss of fear of humans—habituation as the result of nonconsequential encounters. One biologist noted that the transition from nonaggressive behavior to aggressive attacks on humans can be rapid and unpredictable.

  “Wolves are these animals that wander, checking their home range out constantly, trotting, probing to see what’s available,” Jimenez said. “Wolves are very curious too, so a lot of times they are always checking things, but it’s not to seek you out as prey. But they are very, very curious and that presents problems.

  “Predation is a whole series of steps and behaviors. It’s not that you go out and kill something. You spend time searching, looking, finally seeing something, running and chasing it down, catching it, subduing it, killing it, and finally eating it.”

  The attack sequence Jimenez describes refers to wolves hunting game animals like elk as prey, but what about humans?

  “The difference is, with elk, deer, and livestock, that is a clear potential prey base. What you see, research-wise, and from historical data, [is that] people are not. There are rare instances where people have been a prey base . . .

  “When [wolves] see an elk, they see a potential food source, so they go through this series of behaviors. When they see people, there may be curiosity, there may be habitation, but there is not [the instinct that says] ‘this is a potential food source.’ There are rare instances when that has been the case, and when that does happen you clearly see it, and it’s [targeted at] kids. It’s children, and it’s women.”

  The reason for the focus on women and children is because, in most cases, they are the most vulnerable. In certain places around the world, such as parts of India, where there is not a lot of natural prey, poor children in rural villages become targets as a prey base.

  A 1999 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences report detailed the long-standing problem of “child-lifting” by wolves in India, in which packs of wolves hide in the vicinity of a village during the day, with most attacks involving one wolf grabbing a child in the evening as the children play outside, and retreating into the forest where the pack feeds upon the victim. Five wolf packs preyed on children in sixty-three villages, with eighty casualties in two years (1993–1995), and only twenty victims were rescued. Most of the children were three to eleven years old. As appalling as this report is, wolf attacks are not unusual in India and some other places in the world.

  Back in North America, the need to take aggressive action to prevent human habituation of wolves has been recognized by Yellowstone National Park officials. The reintroduction of gray wolves to the park in the mid-1990s resulted in an expanding wolf population that is very visible to thousands of park visitors each year. The park’s policy for management of habituated wolves notes that habituation appears to be a prerequisite for an aggressive act toward a human. But the second key factor i
s humans who act in a nonaggressive manner, which may influence (or “invite”) aggressive canine behavior. Park managers work to educate the public about how human behavior can lead to habituation by wolves, and also conduct hazing and aversive conditioning on wolves to discourage the animals from engaging in close encounters with humans.

  Wolves such as those in Yellowstone National Park have the potential to come into fairly close contact with human activities, so park managers monitor the situation closely, recognizing that a high degree of tolerance toward humans may be acceptable, but certain behaviors are not. These unacceptable behaviors include:

  approaching people without signs of fear

  entering human developments without fear

  becoming habituated to humans and human food

  acquiring human foods at least once

  attacking or injuring a human

  In accordance with National Park Service policy, if a wolf doesn’t respond to hazing or aversive conditioning, or has particularly aggressive behavior, it will be removed from the population, usually by killing, to keep the animal from injuring a person.

  AVERSIVE CONDITIONING

  Aversive conditioning techniques against wolves vary, but all are designed with the goal of giving the predator a negative association in attempt to eliminate undesirable behavior. For example, in certain situations, Yellowstone National Park officials may fire nonlethal munitions (cracker shells, beanbags, or rubber bullets) at wolves when they come into campgrounds or approach humans so the wolves have a negative experience when approaching human-occupied areas.