Officials at Yellowstone National Park haven’t had to kill a grizzly bear inside the park since 2017. That changed Wednesday, when they trapped and euthanized a 400-pound grizzly that had become food-conditioned and was a risk to public safety.
In a press release, NPS officials explained that the 11-year-old male bear had become notorious for seeking out human food by flipping over dumpsters and uprooting trash cans. They say this happened multiple times this spring at several sites, including the park’s most well-known location, Old Faithful.
“In addition to developing a strategy to flip over 800-pound dumpsters,” officials wrote in the press release, “the bear also uprooted smaller bear-resistant trash cans from their concrete bases to gain access to human food and garbage.”
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The 400-pound bear was also uprooting bear-resistant trash cans from their concrete bases. -
An overturned dumpster covered in the grizzly’s paw prints.
Yellowstone is world-famous for its grizzlies, and officials there try to keep close track of the bears. Park officials documented the first bear coming out of hibernation on March 9, and they started tracking the male bear’s problematic behavior less than a month later, on April 3. Between that date and May 13, the 11-year-old grizzly stole garbage on several occasions from receptacles at Old Faithful and other parking lots and picnic areas.
Major entrances to the park, including the North Entrance and the more popular West Entrance, opened to vehicle traffic April 18. Officials say with tourists present, the bear had gotten too clever for its own good and was a threat to public safety.
“It’s unfortunate that this bear began regularly seeking out garbage and was able to defeat the park’s bear-resistant infrastructure,” Kerry Gunther, the park’s bear management biologist, said in the press release. “We go to great lengths to protect bears and prevent them from becoming conditioned to human food. But occasionally, a bear outsmarts us or overcomes our defenses. When that happens, we sometimes have to remove the bear from the population to protect visitors and property.”
Although the saying among wildlife managers today is that “a fed bear is a dead bear,” it was actually commonplace to feed Yellowstone grizzlies garbage and other human food until the 1970s, according to the NPS. Old black-and-white footage shows bleachers that were set up around garbage pits, where nightly bear viewings occurred. These were popular tourist attractions, and it took years for officials to close the pits for the sake of humans and the bears. (During the 10 years leading up to their removal, the park says it was recording around 45 bear-caused human injuries a year.)
Read Next: Proposal to Keep Grizzlies on the Endangered Species List Is ‘Ludicrous,’ Say Western Lawmakers
Grizzlies were also granted federal protection under the Endangered Species Act around this time, in 1975. They remain on the ESA list even though their population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has grown from less than 200 in the 1980s to more than 1,000 today. Citing those numbers, many Western lawmakers are pushing for the bears to be delisted. A public comment period regarding a new federal management proposal for grizzly bears ends Friday.
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