Reprinted from my May 7, 2006 column in the Morgantown Dominion Post
In mid-April a male bear attacked a family as they visited the Chilhowee Mountain Recreation Area on a national forest in Tennessee. The mother and others fought the bear as it drug off her 2-year-old son and rescued that child. The mother was also injured and during the melee their 6-year-old daughter apparently ran off. An hour later the bear was found standing over the dead girl around 100 yards from the original incident. As you know by now the child was dead.
Black bears do not normally attack humans. I can’t be sure, but I do not believe there have been any such attacks in West Virginia in modern times (yes, there have been encounters, but no serious injuries, at least none that I know of). This incident in Tennessee was only the second such attack in that state.
In the state of Washington, on April 22nd, a black bear seriously injured a hunter (wasn’t hunting bears). The hunter suffered a broken arm and hand and some very bad bites. The bear was killed by a hunting buddy as the bear dragged the hunter into the bush.
On April 18 a man was throwing a stick to his dog in his driveway in Washington. A young mountain lion rushed from the brush and grabbed the man on the leg and then ran off. Two days later a woman called the game department to report that a mountain lion had just killed her cat. She lived less than a mile from the first incident. The agency came with dogs and treed the cat, and then killed it.
It is rare for wild animals such as bears and mountain lions to attack humans, but they can, and such incidents occur more often today. Why are these happening?
The last incident was easy to explain. That mountain lion was quite young, weighing only 30 pounds, and it was emaciated and starving. But what about the encounters with mountain lions and humans that occur almost weekly somewhere in the country? How do we explain those increases, and how do we explain the two bear attacks described above. Let’s look at an overview of the situation from a national perspective.
More and more people live and move around in mountain lion and bear country. Take Colorado for example. Thirty years ago, as you drove west on Interstate 70 through Vail and on to Grand Junction, there were few houses and condos on the mountains. Today, there are thousands of homes and condo units all across Colorado. Those folks hike and bike throughout Colorado and encounters with bears and cats are inevitable.
We know that a female bear will defend her cubs. It isn’t because she fears that people will hurt the cubs. Her instincts run far deeper than that. Truth is that male bears, the big boars, kill cubs. In fact, they are the number one cause of mortality in cub bears. Boars have killed cubs since bears were on this planet, so the females defend their cubs. It is a natural thing for them to do and it does lead to incidents where humans get hurt.
Combine the movement of humans into cat and bear country with the fact that both species are increasing in number. For example, mountain lion hunting with hounds has been stopped in Oregon and Washington, and cat populations have increased. Along with that, human encounters have increased. A new plan in Oregon calls for the use of federal agents to shoot some cats (these agents will be paid from hunter dollars, which really upsets hunters because they’d willingly pay to have the chance to hunt mountain lions). Of course animal rights folks don’t like this plan either.
So, we have more bears and cats and more people living and being active where there are bears and cats. In addition, we feed bears, either directly or indirectly. Indirectly in that we have gardens, fruit trees, etc., in back yards of communities where bears can’t be hunted. They get used to the presence of humans, and can even get aggressive when you attempt to stop the bears from eating things they like, in your back yard.
We have suburbs in the western mountains where hunting deer is restricted, and mountain lions love venison. As the cats "learn" to feed on this prey, in suburbs, they too get used to humans, and this then can lead to negative encounters.
More restricted hunting of bears and cats also exacerbates the problem as bears and cats become less fearful of humans. So we have a whole laundry list of changes that have occurred with these species over the past 30 years. Does this overview explain why that young girl was killed in Tennessee? I’m not sure it does, but the changes we are seeing in the country, where people live, numbers of people moving about on mountain trails, less hunted bears and cats, feeding of wild bears, all are factors that will continue to increase in the future. As they do, there will be more people injured and killed by wild animals. It is inevitable.
