Yellowstone bear

[richclover]

Food-conditioned grizzly bear trapped and killed in Yellowstone National Park

 

[PancakeBill]

It happens and it is sad. A fed bear is a Dead Bear.

 

[TheBar]

I'm old enough to remember the long line of cars stopped on the highway into Yellowstone where every car was feeding the bears marshmallows through their side window.

 

[PancakeBill]

And that is what lead to many dead bears. They also had the 'Lunch Counter' where garbage from the park food concessions were dumped and the bears would be waiting. This all lead to bears being habituated to 'free food' and away from their natural hunting.

While working in Yellowstone, every spring we had training sessions, and one session was always the bear presence.

Check this out. Frank and John Craighead - Wikipedia

Great study on feeding bears.

I'm old enough to remember the long line of cars stopped on the highway into Yellowstone where every car was feeding the bears marshmallows through their side window.

 

[Professor David]

We are headed out to Yellowstone next week. In the early 60's, we were not crazy enough to feed the bears but I do remember the bears eating their way through Fishing Bridge Campground one particular time just before dinner...flipping the lids off metal coolers (the lids went high in the air) and then eating all the contents, eating fish that had just been cleaned, etc... One crazy guy was trying to keep the bears from eating all his just cleaned fish. The bears won.

 

[Kirk]

The first time that I visited Yellowstone NP was in 1963 and it was like Yogi Bear was the lifestyle. At first it was great but eventually I began to see how humiliating it was to make beggars out of such majestic animals. Nowadays, visitors do not see nearly so many bears but when they do it is in their natural habitat.

 

[tlmgcamp1]

Not sure where I read it, maybe on this forum, but it was a story of a tourist asking a park ranger why it was so difficult to make a bear-proof trash cans. With a sigh, the ranger explained that there was a significant overlapp in the IQ of the average bear and that of the dumbest tourist

 

[RayIN]

It's not only bear, it's all wild animals that are being fed by ignorant humans.

 

[UTTransplant]

We were camping in a pop up with the kids in Rocky Mountain National Park at Glacier Basin. Every afternoon a park ranger would come by following a bear which visited the dishwashing stations that were outside the toilets. We asked him how it was going, and he said if people would just flush the sinks (they were like big toilets and swooshed debris down, the bear would eventually get bored and stop coming. The smells were still there (smells are EVERYWHERE to a bear), but no reward would discourage them. The ranger was there to keep the bear from being harassed.

Food-habituated wild animals frequently do end up dead. There was a coyote in Death Valley who learned if he stood in the road humans would throw him food and say “Oh, how cute!” He was killed by a car a few years back. Burros get killed by cars who don’t see them when they come begging along the road. The marmots around Old Faithful in Yellowstone lose their hair due to malnutrition because humans feed them our food; they die due to environmental conditions while naked.

“A fed bear is a dead bear.” And so many other animals.