Science Article #2

How to Keep Black Bears Wild

Ehrenberg, R. “How to Keep Black Bears Wild”. Wired Science. January 30, 2010
Retrieved on January 30, 2010 from
www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/keeping-black-bears-wild

When people go to national parks such as Sequoia or Kings Canyon, they should be aware that they are not only stepping into the outdoors but be aware that it’s a home to many different types of animals. One type of animal can be of a nuance are the black bears. Once they become adapted to the people coming into the national parks and eating their food, it becomes a problem. Sometimes, people feed the black bears just to see them up close. By doing so, it makes the black bears more desensitized to humans and not afraid of stumbling into campgrounds looking for human food. The search for food causes damage to properties or even become dangerous to humans because of their sheer size and weight.

To combat this problem, a conservation team had to devise a way to ward off black bears that are prone to eating human food. There are numbers of ways to scare off black bears and they are: pepper spray, rocks, and/or rubber slugs. Still, those ways are not enough to stop them for searching for human food. Over the years, the team had to come up with a technique similar to parenting experiment called “adverse conditioning”. This conditioning is combining negative stimulus with unwanted behavior.

The idea is to conditioned theses bears to stop coming into parks with heavy human traffic and campgrounds. They are extremely persistent when it comes to human food and will be tempted. Even the faintest smell of food will bring them in. To avoid the smells from getting to bears, people should put food in bear proof containers

Another way of warding off hungry bears is to educate people with the consequences of human-bear interaction and ways to minimize these interactions. When going to bear country, one should always be mindful that you are stepping into their home.