In Tragic Week for Grizzlies, Food-Conditioned Adult Euthanized in Yellowstone, Grand Teton Cubs Killed by Older Bear

Just as the summer tourist season ramps up, Yellowstone National Park is down one exceptionally food-motivated grizzly bear. On May 15, park staff trapped and killed an 11-year-old male, Yellowstone’s first removal of a “nuisance bear” since September 2017.

The case against last week’s fatality had been mounting since April 3, and the evidence was more unsettling than the usual hallmarks of a food-conditioned bear. Among the most high-traffic areas of a national park that last year hosted 4.7 million tourists — including Old Faithful, the Midway Geyser Basin parking lot and the Nez Perce Picnic Area — 800-pound dumpsters had been flipped over and bear-resistant trash cans uprooted from their concrete bases.

In a statement from the park’s public affairs office, Yellowstone Bear Management Biologist Kerry Gunther mourned the fact that this 400-pound grizzly was able to “defeat the park’s bear-resistant infrastructure,” and reiterated the extensive measures the park takes to protect bears by preventing them from becoming conditioned to human food.

“But occasionally, a bear outsmarts us or overcomes our defenses,” Gunther said. “When that happens, we sometimes have to remove the bear from the population to protect visitors and property.”

This bear’s euthanization capped a particularly sad week for grizzlies of Greater Yellowstone. On May 13, the carcasses of two yearling grizzly bears were found in Grand Teton National Park, approximately 250 yards apart from each other in a closed area south of Colter Bay. According to the park ranger office, both showed signs of mortality by a large male grizzly.

“While it is incredibly sad to see a grizzly bear lose its cubs, predation by other bears is a natural source of cub mortality in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and has previously occurred in Grand Teton,” Justin Schwabedissen, Grand Teton’s bear biologist, said in a May 14 statement.

Last week’s tragic grizzly loss in Yellowstone, on the other hand, represented a “very rare and exceptional case,” according to Chris Servheen, retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator.

“I’ve never heard of a dumpster-flipping bear,” Servheen, who oversaw grizzly management between 1981 and 2016, told Mountain Journal. “Bears are crafty. They’re smart, they’re always attracted to human food, and they can smell the garbage in bear-proof containers,” he said. “But most bears don't achieve access. And the fact that a bear hasn’t been removed from the park in nearly a decade is evidence of that.” 

Seeking out food, however, is what bears do for a living, and once a bear becomes conditioned to human food, those aromas become its ding force. That bear will start regularly seeking out people food. Those “unnatural cravings” a bear develops, Servheen says, spell doom and chaos not only for that functionally chemically addicted grizzly, but often for its young and any other ursines that happen to observe its behavior.

“Bears have a culture and they transmit information from generation to generation,” he said. 

Protocol for park bear management following a grizzly removal is to carefully examine the situation to determine whether there was some flaw at play. But considering Yellowstone “probably has the best bear-human management system in place anywhere, with over 4.5 million annual visitors, hundreds of grizzlies, and almost no conflicts,” Servheen is adamant that this tragedy was not emblematic of a failure of the system, and says it’s likely impossible to prevent a particularly motivated bear from getting into garbage.  

“Maybe they can figure out a better way to seal the top of those dumpsters so that if a bear tips it over it won’t be rewarded,” he said. “But if the park were to tolerate such behavior, corruption would spread across the system, because that bear will make its garbage available to other bears, which ultimately results in more apex predators dying, and more threats to the ecosystem.” 

Relocation doesn’t circumvent the issue either, Servheen says, reiterating that any bear who’s figured out that garbage is a source of food will dedicate his existence to getting into garbage, thereby risking the lives of other bears regardless of his geography. “[Humane euthanization] maintains the sanitation and safety that protects not only the public, but the bears themselves,” he said.

According to the National Park Service, grizzlies are the most desired species for Yellowstone visitors to glimpse, seconded by wolves. The occasional seasoned park tourist will still wax nostalgic about Yellowstone wildlife-spotting “back in the day;” or during the first six or seven decades of the 20th century when visitors could merely visit a park dump at dusk to witness a gathering of generations of grizzlies. Those bears were unwittingly performing for visitors and, tragically, teaching the learned behavior of dumpster diving to their young.

Ironically, this tradition was a major contributing factor to grizzlies’ near disappearance from the park, which necessitated their federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, and the 44-year, $40 million effort to recover them.

“It’s because we want bears to frequent Yellowstone that some have to be removed,” Servheen said.

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