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Killing Bears to Save Bears

By Beacon Staff

“The good of the one is outweighed by the good of the many.”

That’s one of my favorite quotations ever because it applies to so many issues. It comes from “The Wrath of Khan,” my favorite Star Trek movie (yep, still a Trekkie, even at my age), and so brilliantly offered by none other than Mr. Spock.

But what does it have to do with bears? A lot, it seems.

As has been widely reported, rangers in Glacier National Park recently shot a mother grizzly and accidentally killed one of her two cubs, sending the survivor to the Bronx Zoo. This 17-yer-old female bear had been scaring hikers for at least a decade, getting bolder and bolder, and anybody in the bear management business knows there’s no such thing as an old bold bear.

Rangers even tried aversive conditioning (i.e. chased her with Karelian bear dogs, shot her with rubber bullets, and other non-lethal stimuli), but that didn’t cure her of her chronic bad behavior.

Some people oppose such “management actions,” but sometimes we simply need to kill bears, not just to save people, but to save bears, too. I understand why people don’t like the idea of killing grizzly bears, but then, who does? You think rangers enjoy shooting a mother bear with cubs? Every ranger I ever met reveres bears.

For me, the tough part of this deal is removing cubs from the wild and condemning them to captivity. I personally would prefer the rangers shoot them, too, to save them from a lifetime of exile in a big city zoo. But there’s no chance rangers will do that, so say goodbye to three members of Glacier’s grizzly population.

Anybody protesting Glacier’s decision hasn’t studied the tenuous relationship between bears and mankind. The vast majority of bear incidents can be attributed to a bear that has become too “conditioned” or “habituated” to the presence of humankind, often by getting food rewards from us. This mother bear had been dragging her cubs through occupied campsites, sniffing backpackers’ dinners, and following hikers up the trail like a lost dog.

Bureaucracy is slow to change, but this is a good example of how it finally comes around. You could easily speculate that if rangers would have killed those two female bears back in July 1967 before they killed and consumed two young women, well, we wouldn’t have had the “Night of the Grizzlies,” and two women who didn’t need to die might be joyfully playing with their grandchildren today.

Ditto for the equally tragic incident on September 23, 1976 when another young woman camping with four companions in Glacier’s Swiftcurrent vehicle campground died a horrible death. One of two grizzlies that had displayed dangerous behavior for weeks prior to the incident ripped into a tent and dragged away a University of Montana student, killing and partially consuming her. The National Park Service was still too gunshy about taking out a problem bear before it became a killer bear.

But no more, and we should all applaud the newfound resolve even in the face of criticism from people who don’t really understand the gravity of the situation.

You have to admire rangers for doing all they could to save the cub (i.e. desperately trying to resuscitate it with mouth-to-nose CPR), but as already noted, I’m not too disappointed they failed.

Glacier Superintendent Chas Cartwright noted that Glacier has an “internationally-vetted” Bear Management Plan and Guidelines specifying that conditioned bears that display over-familiarity must be removed from the wild population.

I’ve actually read this plan, and it’s excellent. If this plan would’ve been in place in 1967 and 1976, perhaps three people (or more) might still be alive.

Killing problem bears before they become killer bears benefits all bears. The only reason grizzly bears exist on earth is because we allow it. How remarkably easy it would be for us to remove the great bear from the wild.

We tolerate grizzly bears because there are so few of them in so few places and because, most important, there are so few maulings. Even though many thousands of people hike the trails of Glacier every year, and many of them come within the “defensive perimeter” of a grizzly bear, usually without even knowing it, there are so few incidents. I attribute this partly to excellent management, albeit a bit slow in coming, but mostly to the incredible intelligence and stealth of the creature that so expertly avoids encounters without giving up its spot on top of the food chain.

The last thing we want is more bloody incidents, which leads to less social tolerance for the entire species. When we see a problem, we must deal with it, precisely the way we just did.