Abstract 273 – Wary bears are scary bears…. Key strategies to support habituated bears and create “Wildsmart” humans, near areas of high human use.

Bill Hunt and Steve Michel

Common wildlife management strategies often focus on maintaining wary bears with the well
accepted adage that “a fed bear is a dead bear”. While most experts will agree that food-
conditioned carnivores are dangerous in any ecosystem, the strategy of maintaining wary
behaviour in all bears becomes unsustainable in areas of expanding human development and
exponential growth in human use. In these situations, wariness in bears cannot be maintained
because management efforts such as hazing and aversive conditioning have financial and
personnel limitations, and are vastly outnumbered by benign encounters with people and
infrastructure. Even if wariness could be achieved, wary bears are constrained from accessing
critical habitats by the ever-increasing expansion of human use (both spatially and temporally).
Furthermore, wary bears are, by definition, more likely to react to encounters with humans
(either positively “flight” or negatively “fight”) whereas habituated bears show a waning
response to human use, learned through consistent, repeated neutral encounters with people
and infrastructure. Indeed, in Canada’s National Parks, it is primarily wary bears rather than
habituated ones, that are responsible for human injuries during serious encounters. Therefore,
in settings with moderate to high levels of human use, a better strategy may be to accept
habituated individuals, learn their specific behaviour patterns, and implement “Wildsmart”
strategies that will help keep people safe while allowing habituated bears to persist where
home ranges abut areas of high human-use. The focus shifts to managing human behaviour and
keeping bears out of built-up areas where there is a greater risk of habituation transitioning
into food-conditioning. In this presentation, we will discuss key strategies for tolerating
habituated wildlife near areas of high human use, identify some of the most common human
behaviours that cause this strategy to fail, and suggest strategies to mitigate such failures.