HELSTON: Hundreds of bears die every year for this stupid reason
This goes out to anyone who’s left their garbage out and had a bear get into it; you might as well have put a bullet through its head.
It sounds harsh, I know, but hundreds of bears across B.C. are killed by conservation officers every year because they’ve grown habituated to garbage. Sorry to break it to you, but that’s on us.
Bears are opportunistic eaters, meaning they’ll go for an easy dinner, like the everything salad in your garbage can, over chasing down prey or braving a bees nest. They also have a heck of a sense of smell and can pick up scents from over a kilometre away—and you thought the pungent odour coming from your trash can was strong.
Bears are smart; they’ll remember how easy it was to procure a filling meal—important information when you consume up to 20,000 calories a day—and they’ll become regulars of the great Canadian garbage can. Now they are what biologists call ‘food-conditioned’ and for a bear, that’s pretty much a death sentence.
The Conservation Service doesn’t relocate food-conditioned bears and that’s not because they’re cruel or unkind; it’s because we’ve allowed those bears to become habituated to eating garbage and once they’ve tasted it, there’s no going back. So conservation officers are forced to do the dirty work created by our inability to keep a lid—literally—on our trash.
If I told you it was possible to save a bear’s life by making one small change to your daily routine, would you do it? Because all it takes is to invest in a bear-resistant garbage bin, or keep your refuse in the garage until garbage day.
I know you’ve heard and read about this all before. It’s not groundbreaking information that garbage is the leading bear attractant (followed by compost, bird feeders, barbecues and unpicked fruit trees.) But as our region’s bears start coming out of hibernation this spring—feeling pretty hangry, because, after all, they haven’t eaten in months—I’m telling you, this is how we keep bears wild, alive, and out of conflict with humans: We stop stinking at storing garbage.
To contact the reporter for this story, email Charlotte Helston at chelston@infonews.ca or call 250-309-5230. To contact the editor, email mjones@infonews.ca or call 250-718-2724.
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4 responses
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Unlike bears, people tend to be lazy and neglect dealing properly with garbage. Again, we are responsible for this sad state of affairs. Get bear resistant bins everyone as Charlotte advises.
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Will if you put your garage out early in the morning . Then it would be ok it is your falt nothing to do with bears
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It is sad knowing that this beautiful creatures are shot. It would be nice if the Forestry people could be called and come to tranquilize these animals and relocate them where they can live out their life. My husband did call the Forestry people and he was asked if the bear was bothering him – and if so, shoot the bear. Apparently, they had a lot of complaints come in about this bear as he was becoming too friendly.
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We had a huge bear coming to our large dumpster just prior snowfall – year 2013.We did not know he was on the property until one evening my husband heard a noise on our main entrance balcony to our unit. He open the door and found himself nose to nose with this huge bear. My husband slowly shut the door and the bear turned around and walked down the 3 steps to where our vehicle was parked. In our previous resident manager experiences, we have seen many human “dumpster divers”.We have never seen any one of them have the skilled experience like this bear dumpster diver. Later in the Winter we heard several shots one day and wondered if someone had a new bear rug. There has been no sign of “Brutis”, (as we named this huge bear) during this Winter season, 2014-2015. If he was alive, he would have continued to come to the very large dumpster bin.
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