And weekend executions
A marauding family of Anchorage brown/grizzly bears with a yen for ripping apart locked garbage cans, raiding chicken coops, knocking down fences and causing other damage in their hunt for food have been taken out by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
And the second-guessing as to how and why and who is to blame has begun big time on social media where the story broke over the weekend. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game on Monday confirmed the sow and one cub were dead. Another cub had been captured and a hunt was on for the other.
How a lot of Anchorage residents feel about the killings best be summed by quoting one post from the Nextdoor website that came complete with a modern-day, broken heart emoji: “💔 A sad update on our neighborhood bear family.”
Oh, what a difference a few years make.
The sign that said it all about bears in Anchorage in 2018/Craig Medred photo
The answer that year was to kill a record number 40 bears in the Anchorage area. Only half that number have been killed so far this year, according to the state, and the 2026 situation is in some ways more dangerous than that of eight years ago.
The problems this year have been increasing with the arrival of fall, and some of the brown/grizzly bears that range into the inhabited suburbs have shown unusually aggressive behavior – such as violent attacks on garbage cans. 
And smashing open garage doors because they smelled garbage, dog food or other edibles inside.
Flimsy garage doors are not much of a barrier to an aggressive brown/grizzly bear/Nextdoor
Vandergaw also surrounded his remote cabin, in which he kept that dog food, with an electric fence. Despite a fondness for playing with the bears and getting them to perform for visitors to the farm, Vandergaw knew how dangerous bears could be when hungry, especially adult brown/grizzly bears.
Hyperhagia?
A biological phenomenon called hyperhagia enters the picture here. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes this as “an insatiable desire to eat and drink.”
Over the years, hyperhagia has been discussed as having played a role in the infamous death of Californian Timothy Treadwell and girlfriend Amie Huguenard in Katmai National Park and Preserve in early October of 2003.
Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge biologists worried about how dangerously close he was approaching the bears there managed to harass him off the island, but Treadwell found just as many bears on the Gulf of Alaska coast just to the north, where the National Park Service was much more accommodating of someone who billed himself as a wannabe bear protector.
For 13 summers, the park allowed Treadwell to cavort among big coastal brownies. He named them. He petted some. He tried to kiss a few. And though he knew how dangerous these bears could be, he actively promoted the idea that, as he put it to talkshow host David Letterman, the Katmai bears were just “big party animals.”
Big party animals that they might have been in the summer, but that changed in the fall, said those who had been to the Katmai coast in the months after August when the bears entered the season of hyperphagia. Then, they said, the big animals became much more aggressive.
Treadwell had never stayed into October at Katmai, and the first time he did would not end well. Both he and Huguenard were killed and eaten by a brown/grizzly. It is not a pleasant way to die.
“Bears don’t kill; they eat” is one biologist with a lot of experience around the animals succinctly described death by bear. They are not like the big cats that kill their prey before feasting. Bears eat their prey alive.
The last words of Treadwell as recorded on a video camera with the lens cover still in place were, according to Alaska state officials, a plea to Huggeunard to hit the bear with a pan, the only potential ‘weapon’ the couple had taken with them to Katmai.
The pan didn’t save them. And from the looks of things, a fiberglass garage door doesn’t offer much more protection from an Anchorage brown/grizzly in the early stages of hyperhagia.
Kill ’em
Alaska wildlife officials are well aware of how dangerous these bears can be, which is why their answer to Weddelton’s 2018 question turned out to be as simple as it was distasteful to some. The answer was to reduce the size of the population of bears inhabiting the human-occupied parts of the Anchorage Bowl.
After the record 40 bears were killed in the immediate Anchorage area that year, bear problems largely disappeared in 2019. Only six bears were killed that year by state and local officials or armed homeowners defending themselves or property in line with a state law that allows the killing of bears and other animals in “defense of life and property.”
Two of the bears killed were brown/grizzlies, the least common but largest and most powerful of the species. Though both black and brown/grizzlies have killed dozens of Alaskans over the years, there is no argument about which species is the most dangerous.
Black bears kill people in extremely rare, targeted predatory attacks. Brown/grizzlies bears have been known to kill people accidentally in defensive attacks triggered by surprise encounters or people getting too close to a sow’s cubs. Sow grizzlies with cubs are notoriously defensive.
Of the 16 people known to have been killed by bears in Alaska this century, 12 were killed by brown/grizzlies. It is also worth noting that two of only three people killed by black bears (a polar bear killed one person) were in extremely remote areas of the state when attacked.
The study, led by Canadian authorities Stephen Herrero and Andrew Higgins, observed that “there were 3.5 times as many fatal attacks in Canada and Alaska (as in the Lower 48) but only 1.75 times as many black bears, and much less human contact for black bears in Canada and Alaska.
“We judged that the bear involved acted as a predator in 88 percent of fatal incidents. Adult or subadult male bears were involved in 92 percent of fatal predatory incidents, reflecting biological and behavioral differences between male and female bears. That most fatal black bear attacks were predatory and were carried out by one bear shows that females with young are not the most dangerous black bear.”
Nearly all of these deadly attacks appeared to have involved black bears that stalked humans before attacking them. Many survivors of dangerous encounters with black bears have reported similar behaviors involving bears they shot and killed in self-defense, or managed to fend off with bear spray and an attitude.
Everyone living in Alaska should be aware of this behavioral trait of black bears. It means you should never, ever play dead with a black bear that appears to be trying to get close as if to be friendly.
Bears are wonderful, interesting and intelligent animals, but they are not our friends. Some of their advocates, along with some wildlife biologists, like to make an argument that suggests they are actually less dangerous than dogs by noting that dogs each year kill far more people than bears in North America.
This is both true and hugely misleading. North America is today home to an estimated 900,000 to 1 million bears – 850,000 to 950,000 black bears and 35,000 to 55,000 brown/grizzly bears. But the bears are outnumbered about 80 to one by the 72 million dogs in the U.S. and the 8 million or so in Canada.
Throw in the fact that dogs live a lot closer to people than bears, and that some parents don’t recognize the potential danger of dogs, and it’s no surprise dogs kill more people than bears. The Centers for Disease Control puts the number at an average of 46 deaths per year, and about a quarter of those deaths are of defenseless children under the age of two, according to the DogBite.org website.
Bears have killed only an average of 3.3 people per year over the past 10 years, according to Wikipedia’s list of fatal attacks. But when these numbers are corrected for the differences in population sizes, the bears come out at least five and a half times more dangerous than dogs.
A different time
Some, however, might like to believe otherwise. America is today a bear-friendlier world than it was even 50 years ago when people lived closer to the land and held views of wildlife that stretched back to their parents’ or grandparents’ generations.
The early American view of big predators – bears, wolves and mountain lions – saw the animals as a potential danger and, in many cases, a competitor that killed farm animals and preyed on wildlife on which people still depended for food.
Thus, predators were persecuted in an older America, and, in the case of wolves and brown/grizzly bears, driven to the edge of extinction. Views changed, however, as Americans moved en masse from the land into the cities, and as science made it clear that bears and wolves had often been killed unnecessarily.
Now many view these animals as a persecuted minority, which doesn’t make anything easier for state officials needing to deal with animals that pose a legitimate threat to public safety. The latest Anchorage bear kills have not gone down well on social media. To wit:
“This could have been prevented and is so sad. While driving through my neighborhood, I saw many garbage cans out by noon the day before pickup. I wish they would get heavy fines for what I consider baiting bears.” Gayle in South Anchorage.
“This would not have happened if Fish and Game took them early on to an area where momma can easily find food in the wild for her babies. I don’t know what red tape or laziness causes them to not react quickly, but care that this is the typical outcome.” Brent in Midtown.
“It is sad they couldn’t tranquilize them and fly them far out where other bears are and put them there safe! It sucks when they kill them instead! I am glad they gave the babies a home at the zoo and I hope they find the third baby and take him there too! Breaks my heart they dont tranq and then move to a far out location with other bears.” Alicia in the University District
“And the people responsible for this horrible news. The people who left their trash cans out are the ones responsible. They should be fined 1000 dollars. Minimum.” Lonni in Northeast Anchorage
“It’s a crying shame people along the bear’s route didn’t use bear-proof trash cans. Even worse is why didn’t Fish & Game take any serious action early on before they became a problem. Let’s face it, this isn’t exactly a new situation.” Penny on the Anchorage Hillside
Why state wildlife biologists didn’t act sooner is rooted in the realities of bear management in a state where bear populations are large and healthy. This makes tranquilizing bears and moving them anywhere a costly waste of time; the odds are they will be killed by the bears already living in the area where they are transplanted, or they will beeline it for the scent of the nearest humans off whose ‘waste’ they’ve learned they can live.
Bears live in an inherently harsh world, as was made obvious at Katmai this year after two cubs were killed and eaten by other bears in the view of wildlife-viewing cameras. This was unusual only in that the two killings were caught on camera.
It has long been known that in areas where bears are protected from humans, the greatest threat young bears face is other bears. But it’s not just young bears that get killed. Researchers studying bears in Katmai in the 1990s found plenty of evidence of adult, bear-on-bear mortality.
“Eight adult females were killed by other bears, and in two cases we identified the killers
as adult males,” they reported. “Three of six adult females that died during the summer were killed by other bears, and the rest died of unknown causes. Four bears died during the fall, and the only one for which we could determine the circumstances was killed by another bear. Another female, which was last seen with two cubs in October, was emaciated when found dead on 11 April.
“She died of starvation that was attributed to injuries to her muzzle and tongue that were apparently sustained earlier in a fight with another bear…. Only one adult male and one subadult male were found dead and both appeared to have been killed during the spring by other bears.”
This is one of the many uncomfortable ways in which bears normally die. A bullet is arguably a more humane way to end their lives. And if there is anything to be truly sad about as regards the bears shot in Anchorage, it is this:
Sow grizzly bears moving into Anchorage with cubs are likely doing so because they feel safer here than living in the Chugach State Park and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson refugia that surround the state’s largest city. There are invariably bigger, badder bears – bears that prefer to avoid humans – defending their home ranges there, and cubs are invariably targets for those bears.
That said, there is no doubt that Anchorage residents taking better care of their trash, getting rid of their smelly chicken coops, and putting away their bird feeding stations in the summer would help minimize the city’s bear problems. Bears that get food from these sources quickly learn to hang around looking for more food from these sources instead of moving on.
And bears that pass through urban Anchorage are a significantly smaller threat to the people living here than those that hang out in or on the edge of the city. But simple math dictates that the more bears there are hanging out in the human-inhabited parts of Anchorage, the more likely there will be problems.
Fifty years ago, the situation was different. Even in “Bear Valley” on the Hillside, it was uncommon to see a bear then. Now, it’s common.
Anchorage residents have become much more tolerant of bears over the years. The animals are no longer shot on sight as they once were. This is a good thing. But more bears deciding to make the city their home inevitably means more bears are going to be shot in the name of public safety because bears that decide to smash through garage doors can’t, and shouldn’t be, tolerated any more than criminals that decide to crash through garage doors.
And bears in North America are now so plentiful that there are very, very few animal prisons – otherwise called zoos – want bears. Then again, maybe the state could capture problem bears in Anchorage and ship them to California, where a lot of bear lovers live, to begin rebuilding a brown/grizzly population in a state where the only brown/grizzly to be found these days is the one on the state flag, the rest having been rendered extinct long ago.
This would seem to be an idea all Alaskans could get behind, or at least an idea all Alaskans could get behind if California was required to cover the costs.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
