If you feed them, they will come

[sardog1]

Coming to a neighborhood near you? The Bears Among Us

Wild bears so habituated to the presence of people that the biologists who have come here [to Whistler, B.C.] to study them say they’ve never seen anything like it — bears that lift the door handles of trucks to take possession of the cabs; bears that manage to snag the bait from a trap with one foot while holding the steel gate open with the other; bears that stroll munificently through the crowds at the Canada Day parade; bears in the pubs, the hotels, the day-care centers, the landfills, meat lockers, grease vents, underground parking garages. In Whistler, if a bear doesn’t get into something humans are guarding, it’s usually because too many other bears got there first.

Bears in B.C. are not smarter than bears in the White Mountains or the 'Daks. They just happen to live among more careless people per square kilometer.

 

[Mohamed Ellozy]

A scary thought towards the end of the article:

Each individual bear story can be given an ending, salutary or not, but if the story of our conflicts with the North American black bear seems nowhere near resolution, that may be because enough generations of bears have now become habituated to humans and our fragmented landscapes that, according to some biologists, we may have actually set the species on a new evolutionary path.

“This is speculation, of course, but in the last 50 years, there’s been intense selective pressure on behaviors that allow animals to tolerate and live in close proximity to humans,” St. Clair, the behavioral ecologist, says. “Certainly you see that with cougars, which are famously shy. But that is changing. Maybe bolder bears are selected for as well. It may not all be genetically based behaviors; it could also be learned or cultural transmission, and that spreads much faster than evolution.”

It is a long article with, IMHO, minimal insights. Had difficulty reading it to the end on a slow day.