The bear was never the problem.
The black bear cub that spent a week hanging around the Trans Canada Highway at the North end of Terra Nova National Park wasn’t looking for trouble when he stumbled onto the road. He was looking for food. Unfortunately, passersby were only far too accommodating.
The bear hung around for a week or more, growing accustomed to humans, obviously learning to associate their cars and voices with morsels of sandwiches, chip crumbs, chocolate bars…
"It's obviously lost it's natural fear of humans,” said Kevin Robinson at the time. He’s a Resource Conservation Manager for Parks Canada, who a week earlier had issued an advisory warning the public to refrain from feeding wild animals.
“Black bears or coyotes that are fed by humans may become dependent on people for food, making them unpredictable and sometimes dangerous,” read the advisory.
Thankfully, the cub was safely relocated away from roads, cabins and highways. Park officials are confident he will return to his natural foraging habits.
But had the public heeded the park’s warning, not to mention used a bit of common sense, officials would never have had to step in.
Bear cubs are cute. We get it. But they’re also wild, unpredictable, and very, very strong.
Black bear attacks are rare, coyotes even more so, but as we continue to encroach on their habitat these encounters are only going to become more frequent.
University of Calgary professor emeritus Dr. Stephen Herrero discovered in a study on fatal attacks by American black bear on people that as the human population of North America increased, so too did the number of fatal black bear attacks.
His findings, published in the Journal of Wildlife Management in April of this year, indicate black bear attacks are most often carried out by lone adult male animals on the prowl for food – and that human food and garbage often attracts bears, resulting in a higher risk of attack.
Even so, there have only been 63 recorded fatal wild black bear attacks in North America between 1900 and 2009 – a relatively low risk when one considers the millions of human-bear encounters that occur every year.
Let’s not force the statistics in the other directions.
We’re fortunate to live in a part of the world that still has wildlife. We don’t have the raccoons that plague Toronto, or the rattle snakes of the prairies. Our polar bears are infrequent visitors, and grizzly bears have yet to make it East of Manitoba.
The wildlife we do have is relatively tame, offering no great threat to us when we visit their habitats.
We forget that they were here first.
These animals deserve our respect and our distance, not our leftover lunch.
