Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

In Reno, Nevada, the author attends a five-day Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training (WHART), taught by members of the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service. The Canadian officials lead the seminar because British Columbia has the highest number of bears and cougar attacks in the Americas.

In the lesson titled “Tactical Killing of a Predator on a Person,” (9), the attendees view videos of animal attacks with explanations of what the witnesses did right or wrong to mitigate the attack. The instructor gives advice: If one has a gun, they should not shoot until they are close to the animal to avoid shooting the victim; groups should stay in close formation and communicate.

The next seminar is on identifying the perpetrator by the victim’s injuries and clothing (9). Based on the facial injuries to the manikin on her table, Roach learns that bears tend to attack opponents’ faces, whether other bears or humans. This is because bears, as omnivores, get the largest share of their diet from other non-mammal sources. In contrast, cougars are carnivores who must kill to live, so they tend to attack the neck, a more efficient way to kill. Bear attacks on humans tend to be messier due to the shape of their teeth and the largeness of human skulls. Claw marks from cougars and other cats have more punctures, whereas bear claws show swipes. The instructors explain that any missing body parts could be found in the animals’ stomachs as further evidence.

After noting that the manikins all have intact torsos, the author learns that while animal victims often have their viscera consumed, humans do not, possibly because their clothing deters the attacking animal. In assessing the cause of death, it is also important to determine whether any of the animal predation evidence happened before or after death because it is not uncommon for animals to scavenge human remains. Further evidence can be found on a suspected animal, such as flesh in a bear’s teeth or blood in a cougar’s claws. To prevent a shot bear’s blood from contaminating DNA evidence of human blood, wildlife officers carry tampons to plug animal wounds. These efforts find “linkage[s],” evidence connecting perpetrators to victims (14). To emphasize the importance of linkages, the author recounts two stories. In one, a cougar was blamed for a human murder. In another, an Australian woman was wrongly sent to prison after her baby was killed by a dingo.

Roach asks a member of the Yukon Conservation Officer Services what a person should do if attacked by a bear. He tells her that the adage about identifying a bear by its color is not accurate and too detailed to be helpful. However, identifying a bear’s behavior can determine whether it’s predatory or defensive (16), indicating whether a person should calmly move away or try to look intimidating. The worst thing to do if an animal attacks is to turn and run.

The training moves outdoors to a staged crime scene. People play the roles of witnesses, relatives, and animals. The trainees practice a “diamond-shaped security sweep” (20), pretend to shoot a bear and a wolf, and gather evidence in the field. For instance, drops of blood may indicate whether a bleeding victim ran away or if the blood dripped from an animal’s fur. Drag and scuffle marks are also clues to what happened.

The next day, the trainees examine a manikin with the same injuries as a real-life victim from an attack a few years earlier. They determine that a bear, not a wolf, was the culprit. Bears known to attack humans are killed, as zoos won’t take them. The author surmises that the best way to prevent bear attacks is for people to secure their garbage.

Roach follows Stewart Breck of the National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) as he tours alleys in Aspen, Colorado, observing how garbage practices affect human-bear interactions. Breck’s job is to find nonlethal alternatives for mitigating problems with bears. While laws requiring locking, bear-resistant garbage containers exist in Aspen, there is little enforcement or follow-through with fines for those who don’t comply. As bears enter hyperphagia—the doubling or tripling of food consumption before hibernation—they seek out concentrated sources of fat and calories, such as restaurant garbage and bird feeders. Some bear foraging comes from people using substandard bins, but much of it stems from human negligence.

The author contrasts what’s happening in the city of Aspen with the efforts of a pair of officers in Snowmass, an Aspen ski resort. They not only tell kitchen staff what happens when food waste isn’t properly secured for bears (the bears are killed) but also readily hand out fines. Part of the problem in Aspen is bureaucratic: The legal mandate for waste management companies to mark each bin with a number linking it to a specific customer hasn’t been set up yet. Additionally, bear-resistant containers are not only more expensive, but they require that waste management trucks be upgraded or retrofitted. Moreover, Aspen’s recycling code does not require that recycling bins be bear-resistant, and people sometimes throw trash into those.

One of the main problems with bears coming into towns is that they habituate to people. That can lead to more dangerous encounters as the bears are harder to scare off. Some residents get angry when they learn about bears being killed, but nonlethal alternatives have limitations. Hazing, the act of either scaring away a bear or giving it a painful stimulus, doesn’t work as well during hyperphagia, as the bears’ drive to consume makes them take more risks. Hazing efforts are also short-term solutions. Analyses of bear break-ins to cars and houses show that it is often just a small number of responsible bears.

Translocating conflict bears also disappoints as an alternative for two reasons. The first is that bears often do not stay where they are relocated. In one study, a third of translocated bears returned. Of the ones that didn’t return, a high percentage began causing trouble in a new location and were killed. The second reason relates to that last statistic: Conflict bears learn to associate humans and their buildings with good sources of food. If a translocated bear attacks a person in their new location, the agency or department that moved the bear could be held liable. Unless the problem bear is relatively young—and less able to find its way back—translocation does more to handle media attention than to solve the bear problem.

The changing climate causes bears to hibernate for fewer days. Variations in weather and climate mean that foraged food can be scarce at times, but bears near houses have learned that food is always plentiful around human dwellings. The author goes along with a Colorado District Wildlife Manager to investigate a bear break-in. Impressed that there isn’t much damage, the author learns that bears can be surprisingly deft. These bears tend to live longer because the aggressive ones are seen as more of a threat and put down. After a break-in, a bear is trapped, tagged, and released. If it is a repeat offender, however, it is killed, especially if it is a sow, as mother bears teach their cubs to do the same.

In earlier decades, the NWRC was geared toward managing wildlife as a service to ranchers and farmers. The push toward environmentalism that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s altered its mission toward conservation. However, many fish and wildlife departments are funded by the sale of hunting licenses and are under the auspices of the US Department of Agriculture, so there is an underlying conflict in directives. Human-animal conflict specialists like Breck have begun to focus on managing human behavior to prevent deadly conflicts in the first place.

The author joins a member of the Wildlife Institute of India as he holds “awareness camps” about elephants in North Bengal, an area with a high number of elephant-caused deaths every year. As human populations grow and spread, the elephant’s habitat is reduced, making it hard for them to find the foods they would ordinarily eat. Consequently, they find food in farms, houses, and towns, which increases the rate of conflict. This can be particularly dangerous if a bull elephant is in musth, when their testosterone levels are very high, sometimes causing them to be aggressive. The awareness camps instruct villagers on avoiding agitating elephants and what to do if one comes into their area. There is a hotline for them to call the elephant squad, which herds elephants back toward the forests from which they emerged. Shooting an elephant is not only illegal, but it is hard to do with normal guns and ammunition.

Elephants are dangerous because of their size. Deaths may occur even if the animal merely tries to flee in the wrong direction; therefore, villagers are warned against shouting, setting off firecrackers, throwing things, or running. The officers’ work is as much about guiding the people as the elephants because the farmers are often barely earning a living, and a small elephant herd can quickly destroy an entire season’s crops. Thus, people sometimes act unwisely in trying to move the elephants away. When alcohol is involved—for both the people and the elephants—the death rate increases. Elephants have been known to knock down walls to get to the homemade booze inside. Roach notes that the elephant squads’ efforts may make relations worse in the long run, as the elephants come to associate humans with anxiety and frustration and become more aggressive toward them.

At an awareness camp on a tea estate that uses tractors and firecrackers to fend off elephants, a worker speaks out angrily about the elephants raiding the workers’ gardens. The suggestion to change crops to something the elephants don’t like isn’t helpful, as the workers are growing food to feed themselves. Electric fences are problematic for three reasons: First, the fences may block migration; second, the voltage needs to be calibrated correctly so that the elephants feel it but are not electrocuted; and third, some elephants have learned to push down the fences using wood. Despite the death and destruction from the elephants, the vast majority of people in India view them positively and are against revenge killing. After seeing how the workers on the tea estate are treated, the author realizes that in India, some animals have more rights and better lives than people (71).

The tea estates are dangerous for another reason: leopards. The same wildlife officer also checks up on the residents in an area where the institute relocated a radio-collared leopard.