Earlier this summer, I was jogging on a local trail with my 7-year-old black lab mutt, Camas, when she suddenly froze. The fur along her spine bristled. Then she let out a single, sharp bark — a timbre I’d never before heard.
I caught the unmistakable musk of an animal and my hand shot to the bear spray on my chest. Halfway up a tree less than 20 yards away, a beautiful, small cinnamon black bear stared back at us.
The bear scampered off as Camas growled, standing her ground in front of me on the trail. “Good girl,” I told her, my heart rate slowing to a normal pace. My dog, I assumed, warned me early of a potential threat. I was proud.
In bear country, common wisdom holds that dogs serve as early bear alarms, or even deterrents. That belief, however, has long rested mostly on anecdote. Until recently, almost no one had tested whether it was actually true.
A new study in the Journal of Wildlife Management analyzed bear-dog conflicts involving black, polar and brown bears from Alaska to Florida. The results challenge the idea that dogs make people safer in bear country and they have me rethinking my relationship with Camas in the woods.
“If you think a house pet is likely going to be your bear, not only detector but deterrent, you might want to think twice about that,” lead author of the paper Tom Smith told me over Zoom, one of his dogs begging for attention in the background while mine snoozed next to me.
Smith, a research wildlife biologist at Brigham Young University in Utah, analyzed 326 bear-dog encounters spanning more than a century, drawing from newspaper articles, federal and state government reports, books, records compiled by other bear specialists, and internet searches.
Smith began working with bears more than 30 years ago in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. He’s published influential research on bear spray and guns as bear deterrents, and has become one of the world’s leading experts on human-bear interaction. “As soon as you become the bear guy, then everybody comes running to you for advice on how to be safe,” he said. “So I thought, ‘I’m going to have to get to the heart of this.”
Smith has long been interested in the way dogs impact humans’ odds of an encounter in bear country. But the issue became urgent and tangible to him following a 2023 attack that left two people and their dog dead in a tent in Canada’s Banff National Park. The issue hasn’t gone away. This summer alone, a jogger and his dog were mauled near Island Park, Idaho, while recordings of separate encounters involving dogs in Banff and Alberta went viral online.
The findings
The data show people are largely unprepared for bear encounters and naive to their possible consequences. Dogs ran away, fought with bears, provoked confrontations, drew owners in to fight off bears barehanded, and even boomeranged bears back to people.
The first surprise in the data was how few people carried any deterrent at all. That might be because people thought, erroneously, Smith says, that dogs would be sufficient to keep bears away. Recreators wielded bear spray in only about a tenth of cases and a firearm in roughly a third. All told, five people and 56 dogs died in the encounters Smith analyzed.
Contrary to some common wisdom, dogs also weren’t effective warning systems for bears. In fact, they alerted their owners early of a bear in only 1 in 11 of the encounters the study analyzed. Dogs provoked the bear, instigating the encounter, in more than half the cases. After the bear conflict began, things didn’t look much better: Dogs tangled with bears about 40 percent of the time, ran away in 20 percent of encounters, and didn’t engage at all in about 17 percent of cases. So much for dogs being excellent protectors.
Other findings were less surprising. Leashes were a major decider in the severity of the interaction. Unleashed dogs were involved in six times as many incidents as leashed pets. Smith said dogs without a leash can dart ahead of owners or crash through brush and spook a bear. Canines can also act as bear boomerangs. In 27 of the encounters, dogs brought a bear back to their owners. In 70 percent of these instances, the dog owner was injured. Worse yet, many owners in the data came to rescue their pet when it got in a scuffle with a bear, often with no deterrent. The result: 85 percent of the time, those owners were injured.
Additionally, the data reinforced something bear experts have known for years: the larger the group of people, the less likely the encounter. However, the presence of a dog dramatically shifts that risk. Dogs roughly doubled the odds of a conflict compared to the same-sized groups with no canine companions.
Taken as a whole, the data paint a portrait in which bears and domestic dogs don’t get along. Smith suspects it’s part of the long evolutionary relationship between bears and wolves. For thousands of years, wolves competed with bears for food, killed cubs and even kicked bruins off carcasses. Some of this behavior is on public display in places like Yellowstone National Park, where populations of both species flourish. Modern dogs may still trigger those ancient instincts.
Smith recognizes limitations and nuance in his data, too. For one, it’s important to note that the dogs in the analysis were domestic companions, not highly-trained guardian dogs meant to fend off predators — which data show can reduce bear presence at ranches and farms. Also, data on human-bear conflict inherently shows a bias, depicting only the encounters that went majorly wrong rather than the majority of experiences when people venture into the places bruins live and the species coexist without incident. “For the most part, people and their dogs pass through bear country without incident,” Smith wrote in the paper.
Should your pup join the hike?
“The takeaway isn’t to keep dogs out of bear country,” Smith said. “The takeaway is there are things you can do that greatly improve your odds.”
Best practices, backed by Smith’s data, say to travel in groups, eliminate smells if you’re camping and make noise. Bear bells, he says, don’t work. Above almost all else? “You have no business being in bear country without a deterrent,” Smith said.
Dogs just don’t cut it on that front. According to Smith, bear spray has the highest likelihood of fending off an aggressive bear for the vast majority of recreationists in bear country. But firearms can work too for experienced users. Carry your spray (or gun) where you can reach it in a split second. No matter what deterrent you choose, practice with it. Bear encounters can happen in seconds.
If you do take your dog, consider a leash. “It’s not just dogs and bears,” Smith said. “It’s also dogs and everything else.” Smith’s own dog had been sprayed by a skunk twice in the last month. Mine finds few greater joys in life than chasing ground squirrels, marmots and grouse. So, we’re both faced with navigating how to behave in wild places with these family members that, if they see a deer or elk or bear, may not be able to hold themselves back.
Since talking with Smith, I’ve thought about the role Camas plays in bear country in a more nuanced way. She’s warned me about bears — even since that encounter on my jog. But she’s also ignored bears less than 30 yards away, chased wildlife she shouldn’t and, even in her younger days, treed a black bear.
The lesson isn’t that dogs don’t belong in bear country writ large. It’s that they’re dogs. If recreating in bear country is an odds game, they’re not doing you any favors. As much as we love and trust them, they’re unpredictable. And they can make things worse as often as they make things better.
“It’s a personal thing, it really is,” Smith said. “We work in statistics with a pool of instances. But you are not a pool of instances. You’re you.”
Nick Mott is a Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative reporter for Mountain Journal and High Country News. He is a multimedia journalist based in Livingston, Montana, who focuses on the environment, wildlife, climate and public lands.
