Editor: A letter to Alberta Parks and Environment.
Over the past few years female grizzly bear 148 has learned to tolerate people. I believe she fully understands the tradeoff of making her home so close to us humans.
Like her mother, she chose the busy lower Bow Valley as her home range. With that decision she is well aware that she has to share the landscape with all of us and with the hurdles we place in front of her and all other wildlife.
In return, thousands of people have had the chance over the past six years of getting a glimpse of a rare grizzly bear in the wild.
Bear 148’s behaviour should be regarded as the price for many good management decisions in the past, not the opposite. Hundreds, if not thousands, of encounters between locals, visitors and this bear have ended as they had started – peacefully and without incident.
The few bluffs from 148 directed toward people are not only normal, especially when considering all the people she has to deal with, but they have also always been short in distance (mainly hop charges) and, in most cases related to accompanying dogs.
We’ve all known for a long time now that bears and dogs don’t mix well. Do more endangered grizzlies have to die because our dogs simply prove to be of more value to us? Or are we finally ready to adapt when we enter bear habitat?
These bluffs should also not be described as aggressive, but rather as defensive behaviour. I’ve seen a lot of evidence over the years that the defensive behaviour of female bears towards people will not increase in intensity when they have little furballs to protect, which may be the case with bear 148 come next spring. Instead, I believe her defensive reactions will lessen as she gets older and wiser.
When you consider that in most parts of the world grizzlies and brown bears are rather shy and elusive beings, even inside Banff National Park, bear 148 has made amazing adaptations in regards to surviving in this busy place.
Is she now paying the price for showing such incredible amounts of tolerance and smarts, simply because our tolerance is nowhere?
According to Paul Frame of Alberta Parks and Environment, public safety is the number one concern. If that were the case, why is it that the only solution he sees fit is euthanasia, which is not the proper term for such an action. The meaning of euthanasia is “The act or practice of ending the life of a person or animal having a terminal illness or a medical condition …”
At least name it what it is. The word killing would be much more appropriate in this case. Bear 148 does not have any medical condition, nor is she sick in any way. She is a healthy and super important female grizzly bear soon to give birth to her own first cubs, which makes her twice as valuable.
However, public safety is at risk. Not because of this bear that’s displaying completely normal behaviour, though. Public safety is at risk because we simply seem incapable of policing ourselves. We allow ever more people to drive down our already busy highways.
Public safety is also at risk because we don’t set limits as to how many people we allow on specific hiking trails that are regularly used by bears (bears use them for survival, not recreation).
Public safety is at risk because we don’t set limits and wisely choose which mountain biking trails should be used within occupied bear habitat. We’re also at risk if we don’t finally reserve the so-called wildlife corridors for wildlife and for wildlife alone, without exceptions.
We don’t have to kill more bears to guarantee public safety. We have to change and adapt our own behaviour instead. Is that so hard to do?
Without such limits to our own activities, we will without a doubt come into more conflict with wildlife (not just bears) and most likely not have bears and other large sensitive species left on the landscape in the years to come.
This same kind of human centered thinking and behaviour has been responsible for the dramatic reduction of grizzly bears from this province over the past decades.
More than 6,000 grizzly bears used to roam this province. Today, we have a mere 500 of these iconic animals left. How we manage bears such as 148 from here on provides us not only with the opportunity to make things right, but also with the chance to prove that we have actually moved forward when it comes to our relationship with the very nature that feeds and nourishes us all.
I recently read a very fitting quote: “If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.”
I tend to like both, rainbows and rain. Maybe I am lucky that way. If we can’t fully embrace the small risks that come along with living in the vicinity of wilderness with all of its critters, than we don’t understand our role on this earth, nor the privilege it is to have this intact ecosystem at our doorstep.
The grizzly bear symbolizes wilderness, maybe more than any other animal out there. Are we all really doing our best to keep it that way?
Reno Sommerhalder,
Banff
