Abstract 125 – Aversive conditioning of grizzly bears produces high probabilities of retreat from human-bear conflict locations.

Claire Edwards, John Paczkowski, Colleen Cassady St. Clair

Protected areas provide important refugia for populations of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos), which
are threatened in Alberta. Many protected areas address human-bear conflict with a suite of
non-lethal tools including aversive conditioning and hazing. These tools apply negative stimuli
to bears with the goal of increasing wariness and reducing proximity to people. In Kananaskis
Country from 2000-2019, teams of technicians conducted aversive conditioning on 48 marked
grizzly bears in 6,539 conditioning events. Bears were conditioned using 20 different stimuli,
grouped by modality into: approach (vehicle or foot), noise (vehicles or humans), projectiles
(contact or non-contact), and pursuit (with or without Karelian bear dogs). When bear identity
was known, conditioning was over 50 times more likely to target adult females than adult
males, and in 99% of events where females were accompanied by cubs, cubs were young of
year or yearlings. Frequency of conditioning events significantly declined with bear age. When a
bear response to technician arrival was recorded, the average likelihood of retreat was 32%.
Retreat probability increased with the number of actions in the previous event, the number of
conditioning events in the preceding two weeks, and presence of cubs. When a response to
conditioning was recorded, bears almost always retreated from conditioning technicians (93%)
and rarely approached, either upon technician arrival (1%) or after conditioning commenced
(<0.001%). Bears were more likely to retreat from entire conditioning events when pursuit tools
were used, when there were more actions in the event and with increasing distance to cover.
These results suggest that bears in Kananaskis Country learned to retreat from aversive
conditioning and that this tool can help to reduce conflict-associated behaviour, supporting
long-term residency by bears in this protected area.