The ferocious grizzly bear/”Brehm’s Life of Animals, 1896″
A new study is out from the Alaska Section of Epidemiology underlining just how tiny the risk of being attacked by a bear in the 49th state. It’s almost certain to add to a fear of bruins that runs deep.
Only weeks ago a young woman suffering a severe case of bearanoia accidentally shot herself with the firearm she was cuddling in her sleeping bag in the belief it would protect her. She might have died in a tent in the Talkeetna Mountains but for the efforts of the Alaska National Guard pararescue jumpers who came to her aid.
The problem with the new injury report – which blames the media for news coverage that “can inflate public perception of the frequency and risk of attacks” – is not with the facts it details from research into hospitalizations and deaths from 2000 to 2017, but with its speculation on the future.
The report led Alaska Public Media reporter Zachariah Hughes to Tweet this summary: “In 17 years of data, Alaska health officials say bear attacks on humans are increasing, likely from more habitat overlap.”
That’s not what the report says. What it says is that the number of attacks changed little over those almost two decades, but the way the Epidemiology Bulletin couches the information is problematic.
“While the annual number of bear attack hospitalizations in Alaska does not appear to have changed considerably over the study period (2000-2017),” the authors write, “many of the factors precipitating increases in human-bear interactions worldwide also hold true in Alaska.”
The study offers no evidence to back the latter assertion. It suggests there is a global jump in conflicts due to “increased habitat overlap due to the growth of human populations and increased human engagement in outdoor recreation.”
Alaska history
Those issues don’t really apply to Alaska. Bears were persecuted by the federal government when Alaska was a territory as Wayne Regelin, a former director of Wildlife Conservation for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) has noted:
But when the state took over wildlife management in 1960, one of its first actions was to end the federal war on predators – both wolves and bears. The new state banned poisoning which had indiscriminately killed grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, coyotes and more.
Over the years that followed, bear management in Alaska became increasingly conservative. Bears in Alaska were never depressed to the extent they were elsewhere or eliminated as in some states, and they had clearly reached something near historical carrying capacity by the year 2000.
Alaska is like nowhere else and especially not the Lower 48 states where the situation as regards bears is wholly different.
Alaska doesn’t have the same “habitat overlap” issues as the other states, either. Let alone the “habitat overlap” problems of Europe.
Alaska has grown over the years, but its population of 737,000 remains smaller than the city of Charlotte, N.C. , and most Alaska growth has come in the already well-populated areas of Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Parts of rural Alaska, such as the bear-filled Bristol Bay region, have actually depopulated in the past 20 years. The Bristol Bay Borough, one of the biggest counties in the nation, has been fading since the 1990s.
The human-bear habitat overlap has been shrinking – not growing – there and in other rural areas. It is possible the habitat overlap problems cited by Bombieri will someday come to the state, but the day does not look all that near with the state economy stagnant and no one sure of what the future economy might be.
Power of suggestion
The focus on how the “frequency of bear attacks on humans appears to be
increasing globally,” and how “many of the factors precipitating increases in human-bear interactions worldwide also hold true in Alaska” undermine the report’s key conclusions that no matter how afraid Alaskans might be of bears in the wake of several very public deaths in the last two years, the risk of being attacked by a bear doesn’t appear to have increased much if at all.
The fear of bears is far greater than the danger of bears.
“During 2000–2017, 68 people were hospitalized for injuries sustained during 66 unique bear attacks,” the study says.That number is tiny when compared to other injury data.
Between 2000 and 2017, the report cites 467 people hospitalized after being attacked by dogs, 1,825 hospitalized after bicycle accidents, 4,832 hospitalized after off-road vehicle accidents, and 8,283 hospitalized after highway motor-vehicle accidents.
The average, yearly number of people hospitalized after bicycle accidents – 101.4 – dwarfs the total number of people hospitalized by bear attacks – 68 – over the course of the entire 17 years.
And with motor-vehicles, the numbers are so starkly different as to be largely incomparable. One-hundred-twenty-two times as many people were hospitalized by car and truck collisions as by bears from 2000 to 2017, according to the study.
Fatal crashes in ever year killed almost as many people or more than bears killed in all 17 years. Highway death tolls climbed as high as 96 in 2004, according to data from the Alaska Department of Transportation, which are not included in the study.
The study claims its intent is “to put the risk of (bear attack) occurrence into perspective.” It makes this claim one paragraph after stating that “the frequency of bear attacks on humans appears to be increasing globally.”
People have a hard time putting risks in perspective even when the facts are presented without that spin. That is only more true in Alaska today following a rash of fatal bear attacks in the last two years and a growing number of deaths this decade.
Hospitalizations might not have changed much from 2000 to 2017, but the seven fatalities this decade are the highest since the 1990s. There were 10 people killed by bears that decad after which the number dropped to three in the 2000s, just one more than in the 1970s.
The numbers are so small, the attacks so random and isolated, the data describing exactly what happened so limited that it is hard to draw any conclusions other than that people are on rare occasions attacked by bears and a few of those attacked – very few – die.
It’s the same with lightening. Ninety percent of the people hit survive. So, too, almost 90 percent of the people attacked by bears from 2000 to 2017.
The reality is the data indicates bear attacks remain so rare in Alaska they almost aren’t worth worrying about except in areas where bears are known to concentrate.
Dangerous neighborhoods
“Nearly half (43 percent) of bear attack hospitalizations were the result of bear attacks that took place in the Gulf Coast region of Alaska,” the new report says. The salmon-rich coast generally has the highest density of bears in Alaska, which ups the chances of unexpected encounters.
“Of the 29 hospitalized bear attack injuries that occurred in the Gulf Coast region,
20 (69 percent) occurred on the Kenai Peninsula,” the report said.
The salmon-rich, road-accessible Kenai just south of the Anchorage metropolitan area home to more than half of Alaska’s population is the most popular destination for recreation in a state with few roads.
The Kenai also once had the state’s most depressed bear population. Twenty years ago, state wildlife managers feared Kenai brown bears were an isolated population that might be threatened with extinction. The population was managed very conservatively for years and is now considered healthy.
The Kenai might be one of the few areas in Alaska that bears some similarity to the rest of the globe, but even there much of the land is protected in the nearly 2-million-acre Kenai National Wildlife Refuge and the nearly 7-million-acre Chugach National Forest, which sharply limits one of the “habitat overlap” problems raised by Bombieri, “owning a second house in natural areas outside the city (which) has become a common trend. Such intensified use of wilderness area by humans, especially people that are not used to cohabit with wildlife, increases the probabilities of potentially dangerous encounters with these species.”
In Alaska, the probabilities of potentially dangerous encounters come in the pretty much same old ways they always have come, according to the epidemiology report. Hunters, who spend their time sneaking around in the woods and thus are more likely to surprise bears, account for the largest group attacked.
More than a quarter of the attacks from 2000 to 2017 involved hunters, but hikers, walkers, dog-walkers and runners – some of whom might not be paying attention to much of anything while in the woods – now account for a combined 35 percent.
More than 90 percent of the attacks involve grizzly bears, but a somewhat surprising 30 percent of the fatalities (three dead) were caused by black bears. Though predatory black bears are rare, they are a now well-documented threat.
Black bears attack even more rarely than grizzly bears, and sow black bears with cubs almost never attack. From 2000 to 2017, there were but five documented attacks, and in those incidents black bears killed three people.
Everyone in Alaska should know how to distinguish a grizzly bear from a black because if the latter attacks, the last thing you should do is play dead. The bear wants you dead. Don’t help it. Fight back.
Safety advice
In terms of personal protection from bears, the new study just underlines what has been learned from earlier studies.
“In four of the eight (fatal) incidents, the victim was alone at the time of the attack. The remaining four incidents involved groups of two people. Two of the four incidents resulted in the death of both group members and two incidents resulted in one fatality with little or no physical injury to the second group member,” the study says. The warning that the best bear protection is to travel with a group has been many times repeated.
“At least five (50 percent) of the 10 fatal bear attack victims either did not possess any bear deterrents or possessed a bear deterrent that was not readily accessible at the time of the attack,” the study says, but there is no way of knowing how many – if any – might have been saved by a firearm or bear spray given that such deterrents apparently didn’t work for the other 50 percent.
The study recommends “everyone who is recreating or working in bear country should always carry a bear deterrent for defense and practice accessing and using the deterrent before relying on it for defense in a high-pressure situation….It remains imperative that people engaged in such activities be prepared for bear encounters and attacks every time they travel in the backcountry.”
The advice is sound, but probably just adds to the bearanoia.
Over the course of four decades in Alaska, the author has spent tens of thousands of hours traveling in the backcountry – often without a bear deterrent, regularly alone – and found bear encounters to be generally rare given that most bears avoid people.
I also have had a variety of close encounters with bears while hunting and was forced to shoot a sow grizzly off my leg after she attacked me while moose hunting on the Kenai decades ago. Hunters, of course, are by definition carrying a “bear deterrent.”
I have regularly carted pepper spray around the Anchorage Hillside because the state’s largest city (like Tahoe, Calif.) has a growing number of habituated bears that don’t necessarily run in fear of humans yelling at them. But I have yet to use the spray.
I have on a couple occasions thought about using it to get the attention of recalcitrant blacks bears and one curious young grizzly bear, but didn’t.
In none of those cases, however, was a deterrent really necessary because most bears, as the statistics indicate, are less dangerous than loose dogs. But that doesn’t stop the possibility of encountering the rare “killer bear” from scaring the bejesus out of some Alaskans and visitors to the 49th state.
And there is no denying that if you ever run into that exceedingly rare, predatory bear, you best have a weapon of some kind – firearm, spray, even a good knife. Sixty-eight-year-old, deer hunting Gene Moe of Anchorage killed an attacking, 750-pound grizzly with a knife on Raspberry Island near Kodiak in 1999, and British Columbia man did the same thing only weeks ago.
The bear started gushing blood, dropped Dowler and fled. Provincial authorities later found an injured bear in the area and killed it. It was found to have suffered a knife wound to the neck.
The indigenous residents of Alaska managed to survive here for thousands of years before the arrival of firearms and pepper spray. It seems rather amazing. If bears were as dangerous as some in Alaska now believe, the country would have been vacant when the first White people showed up.
CORRECTION: An early version of this story mischaracterized the status of the Kenai grizzly bear population.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
I was born in bear country, I live in bear country, I have lived in and around bears for the majority of my life. I have always had reoccurring dreams about bears, since the time I was a child, being chased by bears, being surrounded by bears, being watched by bears, being stalked by bears, being attacked and eaten by bears. When I was younger these dreams would wake me from my slumber, terrified. I do not recall ever not knowing what a bear was or the potential danger it poses, it is that ingrained in my conscious and subconscious mind.
I have no idea how many bears I have seen in my life, but it’s been a lot, I have no doubt been closer to more without seeing them, I’ve smelled many without seeing them. As I’ve grown and aged my dreams have become less terrifying and more of a journey to be enjoyed. Even when I was a child I never feared bears other than in my dreams. I’ve respected bears from when I was young until this very day. I think if more people respected that which can cause great bodily harm up to and including death we would be having a different conversation.
To some the lady who shot herself in the leg is a statistic to be used for political gain, hopefully to other she will be a lesson. Her pistol would have been of better use, in the extremely rare chance it was needed to fend off a bruin and not a human, had it been located in a safe location outside of her sleeping bag but within arms reach.
The difficulty of comparing the number of bicycle injuries to bear attacks is that far more people are riding bikes than are hiking in bear country. I believe that the risk of a bear encounter is measurably greater because there are not that many people doing things in bear country. I think if one hikes around in the woods they are eventually going to encounter a bear. And there will be an encounter in some cases. While the thousands driving bikes will have their accidents, the per capita rate of bear encounters will be greater.
Finally, you hit the nail on the head . No pun intended : )
That might be true in the lower 48, but virtually all of Alaska is ‘bear country’. The Anchorage Municipality alone has hundreds of bears. In fact all the major population centers in Alaska are in ‘bear country’ along with most of the other minor population centers. It would actually be easier to list the few villages in Alaska that aren’t in ‘bear country’ than it would be to list those that are. I don’t see thousands riding bikes anywhere in Alaska, tens in some places, maybe a few hundred in Anchorage all over town, one or two in other places…not counting children of course.
ditto.
that would be true if it were true. a lot of biking in Alaska, possibly most biking in Alaska, takes place in bear country. on any given day, there would appear to be vastly more people mountain biking Kincaid Park and Hillside/Bicentennial parks than on the streets. those places, which are home to significant numbers of bears, are often crowded with cyclists.
one never sees cyclists in packs on the roads and streets of Anchorage.
and whether you on the road or trail in Anchorage, you are in bear country. several years ago, when i was still working at Alaska Dispatch and regularly commuting there by bike from the Hillside, i enjoyed one full month when i had a bear encounter coming or going every day for a month.
i even had a near collision with a bear when it darted into a cycle lane painted on the side of the roadway. i can only guess the bear, like a lot of drivers, was trying to beat the traffic to get across the road and never noticed the bicycle.
Bears are tasty . We need lots more around. Especially the black ones/ blueberry bears . Reduce predator control ; )
Craig Medred has done it again spraying common sense over the human population to reduce hysteria!
Good article, Craig. I have never used bear spray on a bear, though I have had a couple of tense encounters. However, I have “practiced” three times on dogs while biking. I now encourage others to use bear spray to deter aggressive dogs. It works great. The three I have used it on just sneezed, shook their heads, and wandered off. I have seen two of the dogs several days after being sprayed and they appeared fine. (I even got to pet one.) The beauty of using bear spray on dogs (beside it being good practice) is that it helps provide negative reinforcement for the dog owners, since the pepper spray gets in the dogs’ fur, bringing it back to the owner.
Let’s face it, there are bears in Alaska and quite a few. As they say “you may not see a bear but, one isnt far away”. I believe this to be fairly accurate. It is true that most want to be left alone and avoid conflict, most, but, not all. They are predators and opportunists. I have no doubt (other than surprised attacks) that some bears will eat you under the right circumstances. The question is, which ones? There is years and years of data that is constantly being revised to help decrease bear/human conflict. I remember one time when I was out in a sedge flat when a large, scarred-up, bore locked onto me and wondered over to about 10 yards or so. All “cowboy” on me and pissing all over himself. He was a grumpy bear and I have no doubt that this “confrontation” could have gone a different direction depending on how I acted. There was a lot of curiousity and intimidation going on. Lucky for me, I had time to identify and plan my course of action. I do know one thing, I’d never trust my life to a lone can of spray. “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst”. It would be silly to think otherwise.
This story reminds me of the “fear” being sewed by being killed by an “assault rifle” or gun by a legal owner. Heck, even the loonies are urging caution when traveling to the USA over isolated shooting incidents. They sure aren’t talking about inner city violence. We all know that would be “racist”. We are evening hearing the lies that “white people are a greater danger than Islamic Terrorism.”. Good grief! So, we have to consider the sources and motivations for pushing all these fabricated stories.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/08/06/mass-shootings-force-foreign-countries-issue-us-travel-warnings/1930215001/
Bryan,
You said:
“Heck, even the loonies are urging caution when traveling to the USA over isolated shooting incidents.”
The reality is that: “Every day, 100 Americans are killed with guns and hundreds more are shot and injured.”
As we see nearly 13,000 homicides a year, our domestic “casualty rate” is near the loss of GI’s during the Vietnam war?
This new type of “civil war” is plaguing America from Coast to Coast.
Add in the 76,000 who are “shot” and live each year and you can see the dystopian world that we are headed into.
https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/
Little more reading on your Leftist org “Everytown”. Sadly with Google you have to schrol several pages past their propaganda.
https://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2018/03/19/anti-gun-organization-everytown-continues-long-proud-tradition-clowning/
Steve and ect ,Treating the Symptom rather than the whole disease will not cure the patient. Gun violence is a symptom. You must address the real problem which is mental health, economy, environmental chemicals/ toxins , education and a flawed medical system that utilizes drugs for immediate lazy answer ,destruction of family values destruction of valuing a person for what each individual inherently is and was evolved to do,Ect ect . Remove guns ? What’s next knives ? Rocks ? Ahh I know the hand caused the offense – remove it . (There’s a silly extrapolation) The real problem is whatever that’s going wrong in the brain! Treat the real problem- Determine how these problem folks got to where they did and fix it but don’t destroy American society by infringement on constitutional freedoms . – The worlds best hope for a free mankind. These deaths you speak of have very little to do with firearms and everything to do with the individuals being sick in some way that usually could be prevented if support was given early enough in life . The sacrosanct importance of the nuclear and extended family comes into play. (The importance of balancing ideology- example our free healthcare for women and infant children, our safety nets for people who fall on hard times an example of positive parts of socialism that reaps positive benefits that ripples through society) Education on how to raise good hearted and honorable children comes into play as a solution against gun violence- quality involved mothers and fathers. Those are our best defense against gun violence. . Not asinine red flag laws and constitutional infringement.
Bryan,
Maybe you prefer the CDC’s data set on gun violence?
Either way we are loosing 40,000 U.S. residents a year to gun deaths.
I believe we lost around 70,000 G.I.’s in over 10 years of conflict in Vietnam?
To think 3/4 of that amount is dying EACH year in Amerika from “discharged” firearms is mind blowing to me.
“In 2017, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S. according to the CDC.
In 2017, six-in-ten gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (23,854), while 37% were murders (14,542), according to the CDC.
Three-quarters of all U.S. murders in 2017 – 14,542 out of 19,510 – involved a firearm.”
Civil War is defined as “a war between citizens of the same country.”
Put another way, more Americans died in our first Civil War than in all of the country’s other conflicts combined.
For a country that has been at war for much of its existence that is a sobering fact.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
Come on Steve, give the gun thing a rest will ya.
Here are a few more/additional/elaborated upon things which kill more Americans than guns if you need the extra data to make yourself feel smart (per the CDC):
Heart disease: 633,842
Cancer: 595,930
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 155,041
Accidents: 146,571
Stroke: 140,323
Alzheimer’s: 110,561
Diabetes: 79,535
Influenza/Pneumonia: 57,062
Kidney conditions: 49,959
Suicide: 44,193
Gun deaths? Annually? 33,000.
There’s also overlap because, of those 33,000, only 12,000 are homicides. The rest are suicides.
Heaet disease has killed more in 2yrs than all wars combine. You were saying?
Steve,
Citing to Everytown? Really? The majority of people, over two thirds, “killed with firearms” are suicides. The overwhelming majority of those are non-prohibited adults, the majority of those male gun owners. Given that, there are no “common sense” restrictions that can be expected to have any meaningful impact, they have the gun, they have access to them, they can legally (and illegally) get more, and even a flintlock musket is sufficient for the task.
Of the remaining homicides, about 80%+ are “gang-related,” or, more accurately, criminals killing other criminals and their associates in the course of crime, or settling their puerile petty beefs, taking turns as attacker and victim. The majority of those killings are concentrated down at the “corner of city block” level in a few counties in the US The remaining criminal homicides are primarily domestic violence related, the culmination of escalating, often mutual, violence. Neither of which, like suicide, is a general risk for the majority of people.
The remaining homicide numbers do include violent crimes against the innocent, which include those caught up as bystanders in the two types above, but they also include legal interventions by law enforcement and law-abiding citizens, as well as the statistical noise of mass public killings, particularly those involving any sort of long gun.
In any event, there are no “common sense” gun laws proposed which, per the extant research, can have any impact on access by the cohorts committing almost all criminal violence with firearms.
Steve,
Give a useful statistic, like how many bears were killed without guns vs how many were killed with guns. I’m sure there is a pretty decent percentage that were killed by vehicles but other than vehicles and guns what percentage of bears are killed by other means?