This is a tactic that has been used, but it appears to be best to drop a single item at a time, slowing the bear down for longer until you are far enough away for the bear to lose interest. This is likely to work for a human acclimated black bear, less so for a Grizzly or polar bear.
You're in the forest and a bear passes by. Assume no baby bears, and he's not hungry. How dangerous?
While all of this is true, the park rangers intentionally baited the bear to the campsite. They should have been mentally prepared for the sow to be attracted, and recognized the described behavior as dominance play rather than an actual threat.
It the bear is interested in food it will stop and exaime the food source. In fact, in many cases feeding bears at designated sites away from populated areas will cause bears to leave people and residences alone because they don’t need to forage through garbage. The (very rare) case of homicidal North American black bears, on the other hand, the bear will probably continue to stalk the hiker. However, again, if a bear really wants to attack you, you’ll likely never see it coming. They can move with surprising silence and with lighning speed (bears have been clocked sprinting at speeds up to 35 mph, faster than the fastest recorded human runner. You will probably not have time to draw a pistol much less aim for a critical spot that might stop a bear in its tracks.
Stranger
AIUI, the situation in Churchill (and presumably also in Arviat) is that in the winter, Hudson Bay ices up, and the polar bears spend their time on the ice pack hunting seals. In the spring, the ice pack melts and the bears can’t effectively hunt seals anymore, so they come ashore, where the spend several months just getting hungrier and hungrier. They rarely wander into town, but it’s something the residents have to be ready for. Problem bears (the ones that actually do come into town) get captured and held in cells for the rest of the summer until the bay freezes up again.
Moderator Note
Let’s refrain from insults in General Questions. No warning issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Definitely not going to disagree with that, just responding to the question of why they didn’t use the tranq gun; once they’d stupidly created that situation, a tranq gun would be useless.
Even though the behaviour sounds like dominance rather than aggression, that sounds like a situation where training would indicate that at attempt to dart would be a Bad Plan (I’m not trained in the use of one, but my mother, a zoo manager, is and went through it with me when she got one so I’d know the limitations). Animals can react unpredictably to being darted, so an animal that is already close, potentially lethal and paying attention to you is one you should not attempt to tranq unless you are absolutely sure you could shoot it dead before reaching you if it reacted badly and attacked.
From the description, they should probably have just let it feed and leave, then try dart it in a more planned way later, as it wasn’t acting aggressive and they shouldn’t have shot it unless necessary, but they probably shouldn’t have tried to tranquilize it right then either.
Agreed on all points.
Stranger
The problem with that plan would be how to implement the “later”. As I said, I was very distressed that the bear was shot – extremely so – but now that I understand that the tranquilizer would have been slow-acting, I’m not sure there were many alternatives. From an armchair-quarterback perspective it may have seemed improper to “bait” the bears into returning to the campsite, but how else are the rangers supposed to find them? And is it really realistic after Mama Bear displayed aggressive behavior – and was clearly going to be very protective of her cubs – for the rangers to just say to us, “well, we think we’ll be off now and handle this some other time – see you later!”. Really?
What if the rangers had done this, reported all this, and then something Very Bad had happened to us, like being mauled by a bear? What would be the rangers’ position with respect to their jobs, not to mention the possibility of prosecution for criminal negligence?
There are standard procedures for tranquilizing and tagging or relocating bears which have been well established and demonstrated by wildlife researchers for decades. As Filbert correctly notes, tranquilizing an animal the size of a bear is a highly variable process and requires experience and planning, but it isn’t a major risk if done correctly. In this case, the described actions of the park rangers really sound like they were not experienced in this and panicked at the totally expected behavior of the bear after deliberately baiting it into a campsite where the previous campers had unintentionally lured it through poor food hygiene practices. I’m not so upset that the sow was killed—which is sometimes necessary for population control even if the bear is not actually threatening—as I am about how unnecessary it seems to have been given that the bears did not menace your party despite the nearby presence of a food cache they were interested in. Although relocation does not generally work very well, the park could have instituted a feeding program to keep the sow and cubs away from the campsite which has been shown to work very effectively in other situations and has the added benefit of being able to observe and learn about bear behavior.
Stranger
Assuming that by now all factual questions have been answered, I will suggest that if one should encounter a bear in the woods, he or she should never try to force said bear to dance (even in a John Irving novel):
But see, Defense Against Bears with Pistols: 97% Success rate, 37 incidents by Caliber. Hardly a reviewed scientific publication, and the plural of anecdote is not data, but those people found handguns to be of use in preventing further injury from bears.
I agree with your post for the most part, and despite a LOL “97% success rate” I would very much like to never have to try and shoot a charging bear, pistol or not. I also am suspicious of just how much danger many of those people were in those accounts.
I’m just saying that, should the hiker want to spend the weight on carrying something like a 10mm Glock or stouter revolver, with properly selected ammunition, to guard against a less than one in a million risk, the firearm won’t be useless.
Do bears prefer the .45 ACP or the 10mm Auto, and if the latter, what opinions do they have in the 165 gr versus 180 gr pentration debate? (I’m making the assumption that they disdain the 9mmP entirely and with their large paws find the .40 S&W an unnecessary compromise between performance and recoil.)
Stranger
Which one fills them up faster?
(Trick question; bears are never full. Seriously. They’re like Nature decided to cross a dog and a pig, without the social tendencies of either.)
I could see a bear, like if the Berenstain Bear Dad got really, really angry, deciding to instead carry something like a Shockwave, but chambered in 2-bore.
I’ve encountered 8 or 10 Black bears. Most didn’t care about me at all. One with cubs just wanted to get her family away from me. Another time, I was hiking on a trail when I heard something large rushing up a tree to my right. Couldn’t see it, but it made more noise than a raccoon would. I guessed it was a cub, which led to the thought, ‘where’s momma?’ Seconds later I heard, then saw, Momma about 50 yards away. She stopped, chuffed, then ran away.
Saw a grizzly once. Wife was walking maybe 10 feet in front of me. As she came over a rise in the trail she spooked a young male. He was even more frightened than we were, and took off at impressive speed.
Some other anecdotes.
I live very high in the Colorado Mountains. We see moose mostly as of late. DON’T mess with moose. As docile as they are eating ‘grass’ in your yard, they will gladly kick your ass.
I’ve seen 6-10 Black Bears in my 25 years. Three or four have been a problem (found one in the back of my pickup truck one time, another broke into a neighbors crawl space). We store our trash in a shed about 75 feet from the house. I take trash to the dump twice a month. Twice I have had the door to the shed ripped off. I’ve reinforced it quite a bit. And have found that crushed moth balls on the steps to the shed, and right inside the door has deterred the bears. Haven’t had a problem in about 4 years. The crushed moth ball trick really seams to work. As they are coming out of hibernation now, I should spread some.
There have been a few times when a bear has been persistent. A bear that sits and scopes out the house for hours. Kinda weird. Banging pots and pans, yelling at them nothing worked. A large caliber rifle shot into a tree stump near them does scare them off. Feel kinda bad about that, as they have just as much or more right to be here than I.
DON’T feed wildlife in the mountains. Even birds. It’s unfair to them, and a bear will find it. A neighbor found one on his second story deck trying to get to bird seed (climbed up the post, there where no stairs)