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03-03-2016, 11:52 PM | #1 | |||
The future is unwritten
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Mar 4th, 2016: Blaze
This is Blaze, a Grizzly in Yellowstone national park.
She killed Lance Crosby, a 63-year-old man working in Yellowstone as a medic for the summer. Then she and her cubs ate part of Crosby, and buried the rest for later. Yellowstone Park Superintendent Dan Wenk decided to kill her and ship her cubs to the Toledo Zoo. Jesus, Ohio, that's some cold shit. In the week between the death of Crosby and Wenk's decision all hell broke loose. Quote:
And there was one other thing... Quote:
link A bigger question than Blaze, Nat Geo wrote in August... Quote:
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03-04-2016, 07:29 AM | #2 |
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Tourists and bears will ALWAYS be a bad combination.
I realize the human victim here was not a tourist--but he was there working to make a wilderness area tourist-friendly. The re-introduction of grizzlies in the Bitterroot Valley is still a huge hot-button issue locally, and accidents do happen. Several years ago a big ol' biker on a big ol' Harley collided with a 600-pound grizzly up near one of the many passes in the area; both died at the scene if I remember correctly. I've photographed the tracks of a very young bear--I thought it was the trail of a large raccoon at first--half a block from my apartment and only a couple hundred yards from the town's high school! Probably a black bear...we hope. I think a lot of the problem comes from two sources: how long it took us to get aggressive about people and garbage and feeding 'beggar' bears (and other large, dangerous, food-aggressive wildlife) and the current attitude among humans that only WE and what we can get out of something are important; if a species has little direct value to humans it's much harder to protect. Grizzlies belong to the category known as "charismatic mega-fauna", so massive efforts are made to help them because it brings tourists with cameras and fees in hands to our national parks in the West. Try getting that level of public support, or tourist interest, for a four-inch salamander smaller around than a Sharpie pen! Personally I think we screwed up BAD in the early years of the national park system, leaving too many city folk sure of their safety in wilderness when they've had no training whatsoever how to interact with the wild. This is why I do not go on long solo walks, photo-op-hunts, or rockhounding ventures in real wilderness. I am NOT trained for that, not ever likely to be a good shot particularly with a large-caliber gun, and I'm not going to lend my carcass to the argument about people vs. bears, at least not that way. Never mind that most of the local mega-fauna are aggressive if they feel stalked or cornered! We have bear, moose, elk, whitetails, cougars, coyotes, bighorns AND mountain goats, any of which could put and end to me in about 10 seconds flat and all of which have been known to attack humans even if not locally. The difference between my camera and one in the hand of an urbanite tourist is that mine will never be used to annoy dangerous animals on their turf. That is the thing we forget the fastest about genuinely wild animals--to them, the entire world is about survival of the species & individual. Some of them will attack to get rid of us because we get too close to dens or babies, some to take something we have because "if I can take it I can eat it" is a totally valid strategy to a bear as much as to a bison, and some will view us as predators have viewed humans for thousands upon thousands of years--made of meat. |
03-04-2016, 07:50 AM | #3 |
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Maybe we should replace the bears with cardboard cutouts of bears. I don't think anyone has ever been eaten by a cardboard cutout.
And the wolves, too. But seriously - I think Africa provides an example of how this is really supposed to work. And one more thing - why is it one guy's decision?
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03-04-2016, 08:32 AM | #4 |
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I'll admit I'm no expert, but when a bear kills a person, I think it makes sense to kill the bear. The attacks are so infrequent, and there are enough bears that it's not going to decimate the bear population to do so. And once a bear is no longer afraid of humans, it's going to be more likely to do it again. Even if it's a mama protecting her cubs.
I hold as self evident that if you are weighing a human's life against an animal's life the human life wins. |
03-04-2016, 08:52 AM | #5 | |
The future is unwritten
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Yellowstone is a unique park because of it's geology. The wildlife is a nice sideshow but I wonder how many people come to see the wildlife? How many come to see bears?
As I understand it, the idea was to keep Yellowstone as close to original... at least when the white man discovered it... without endangering tourists. But when that was decided people were mostly non-urban and had a little sense about wild animals. My favorite Yellowstone story is the ranger catching a woman painting her kids face with honey to get a picture of a bear licking the kid's face. Quote:
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