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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

DNR bear feeding proposal justified

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In a recent editorial, the Timberjay opined that the DNR’s proposed legislation to curb intentional bear feeding without “sound evidence” is an abuse of power. Fortunately for newspapers, the Timberjay isn’t held to a similar standard in claiming the legislation targets Lynn Rogers because of “bad blood” between the DNR and Rogers, while offering no supportive evidence. But what the DNR thinks of Rogers is irrelevant, as long as the proposed legislation is good public policy. Arguably, it is.

Key in whether feeding bears is a “constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness” or nuisance-generating activity is whether “diversionary feeding,” or the practice of intentionally feeding bears in one location, keeps them from becoming a nuisance, or worse, elsewhere. Rogers and his supporters claim it does; the DNR claims it doesn’t. Neither is correct. The fact is diversionary feeding works…until it doesn’t.

Adult females and young bears occupy relatively small territories for much of the year. A reliable feeding station could easily be visited by them on a daily basis, likely keeping them from raiding nearby unintentional food sources (think garbage cans and bird feeders). That is, until they leave their home territories, as females sometimes do on extended fall trips, and young bears do when dispersing from their birth territory. It’s then that their new-found tolerance for humans, instilled by hand feeding in particular, gets them into trouble. The same is true of adult males, who have large territories and travel widely, often too far from any given feeding station to rely solely on it.

We live in the middle of Tower, but in recent years have had the misfortune of being visited by these habituated bears. One climbed the fence into our back yard and attacked a bird feeder several feet from the back door. Had our five-year old cousin stepped outside at the time, he would have inadvertently trapped the bear in a corner of the yard where the bear’s only escape would have been right where Hunter stood. While the bear almost certainly wouldn’t have harmed him, it’s not a position a young child should find himself in because someone is exercising their “constitutional right” to the pursuit of happiness by feeding bears.

Last fall a severely-habituated bear roamed Tower for days, repeatedly breaking into garages, including ours, even though I’d locked and barricaded the door. This bear was so tame that even my “man-bites-dog” attempt to shoo it from town by repeated charges inspired it to no more than a casual amble through the neighbors’ yards. A wild bear would be reluctant to enter an enclosed building, let alone share it with a human, but this bear was so tame I spent 40 minutes in the garage with it, hitting and jabbing it with a pole from several feet away, while it ignored me in favor of a large bag of peanuts, only deigning to leave when it had exhausted the supply.

Confronted with such a situation, most homeowners would simply have called the police, and therein lies the real problem with feeding bears, because their only option to resolve the situation would have been to kill the bear. Habituating bears through feeding them, especially by hand, can keep them out of trouble temporarily, but eventually finds them in situations where the bear suffers the harm, never mind the nuisance to us humans. As one wag put it, a fed bear is a dead bear. And that’s why the DNR is justified in proposing a feeding ban, and the sooner the better. As Rogers, with his extensive social media reach, continues to promote hand-feeding, the risk mounts of bear feeding becoming so popular it’s politically impossible to enact a ban, as it is now for deer feeding, which, as the Timberjay correctly points out, also causes problems.

Steve Wilson

Tower, Minn.