Law enforcement euthanized two more bears in Sitka, bringing the total to five this season. KCAW’s Lauren Salemo sat down with Steve Bethune, a wildlife management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, to discuss bear season so far and how the decision to dispatch a bear is made.
BETHUNE: People ask me all the time, is this a better year than last year? How does it compare to prior years? And I’ve been doing this a while now, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that every year is the same and every year is different. We always have bear issues. Nothing ever happens exactly the same as it did the year before, but I’m not surprised, necessarily, at what’s going on this year.
KCAW: What happened with the two removals from this past weekend?
BETHUNE: So, right off the bat, I just want to say that we don’t kill bears in Sitka just because there’s bears in Sitka. We take those decisions very seriously. No bears are ever killed for no reason. Anytime we remove a bear, it’s because we think there is a high likelihood of additional property damage and a potential threat to public safety. So we could choose not to remove these bears —and there’s a chance that nothing would happen — but we’re not willing to take that chance. People are more important than bears, and if there’s a potential that somebody could get hurt, we’re going to take that bear then out of the population.
This year, things seem to be very related to livestock and chickens, in particular. And so we were kind of watching that and seeing, oh, this is going to be be the year of the chickens. We had a sow and two grown cubs that seemed to be keying in on that food source, and then they killed a goat, and that was kind of like over the edge. What’s next is potentially somebody’s pet. So that was like the moment where, like, okay, the decision we’re gonna make is to remove this bear.
So we started looking for those bears. And so one of the bears this weekend was kind of a case of mistaken identity — a bear in the wrong place, the wrong time — that we thought might be the sow that we’re looking for, but still exhibiting behavior that warranted removal. And then the bear in Totem Park was a bear that had been allowing people to get pretty close to it. And there was information that suggested that bear might have a gunshot wound from a previous incident with the police department. Well, now we have a bear that’s potentially wounded. Those bears can be aggressive and tend to be more dangerous, and also we have people approaching, and so we needed to check out this bear. So we did, and we determined it was not that sow, it was just a bear doing bear things in its natural habitat.
We kind of left it at that, and kind of handed it off to the park service, like we’re going to have to do some people management here. But then later that night, that same bear did have a negative interaction with a person where it acted very aggressively and bluff charged somebody. And so that, combined with people approaching this bear closely, we decided this is too dangerous of a situation for people. So we’re going to protect people even if people are behaving poorly and making poor decisions, because, again, people come first even when they’re not acting wisely.
KCAW: How exactly do you come to that decision, and why is it necessary, as opposed to, say, just relocating a bear?
BETHUNE: Relocating bears doesn’t work. We’ve demonstrated that over and over and over with the department over the past 50 years. We’ve tried it on numerous occasions that it rarely works. Every situation is a little different, and I guess that’s kind of where my expertise and experience dealing with these over the years comes into play. Sometimes it’s a very quick decision; a bear will have some sort of action that we’re like, “Well, we’re going to do this now.” For instance, bears that kill pets, bears that break into homes, bears that break into garages, that’s an absolute over-the-line. Other times it’s a series of events that kind of escalate. It’s on a trajectory that it’s not going to come back from, and we often take preventative measures in these cases.
KCAW: What happens to the bears’ remains after they’re put down?
BETHUNE: The hides get skinned and we send them to Anchorage, and they get sold at it. We have an annual hide, horn, fur auction. The carcasses generally are taken to the transfer station because the meat is not palatable. Oftentimes the raptor center doesn’t want the meat because they’ve been shot with lead bullets, and so that poses a hazard to the birds they have there, and the meat’s not fit for human consumption, it’s not fit for animal consumption, just because of the high parasite loads in them.
KCAW: Anything else you’d like to tell Sitkans?
BETHUNE: Because the bears were focusing on livestock this year, I just want to reiterate electric fences for your livestock. Your electric fence needs to be part of your action plan before you even start to gather your animals. You need to have those in place rather than getting your animals and then figuring out what your fencing is going to be like, and you’ve got to do a really good job of it. You can’t just string one one line of electric fence around the top of your chicken coop and call it good. These are very resourceful animals. They’re going to figure out a way to defeat weak electric fence systems.
