The Ways We Discuss, Treat and Otherwise Interact with Wildlife Need to Change
From geese in Minnesota to bears in Vermont, humans often play victims of wildlife encounters they create.
In Vermont these days, you can hardly pick up a newspaper, scroll a news feed or listen to radio or watch TV without getting a story about how people should be “alarmed” by the potential for bear encounters. It is, after all, that time of year when last year’s cubs, who over-wintered with their mothers, are now, for the first time in their lives, needing to go off and survive on their own. As these younger, smaller bears learn to do that they need to push their boundaries in all kinds of ways, in very much the same ways human teenagers do.
Think about it: A young bear who has just separated from its mother for the first time has no real territory of their own. They need to set out to find it or create it. Bears are naturally opportunistic feeders and at this particular time of year these adolescent bears are even more bold and opportunistic than usual, because they have to be. That is normal. That is natural. You wouldn’t, however, understand any of that listening to the ways wildlife officials talk about bear encounters with humans, that are almost always the result of people doing stupid things that make food accessible to hungry bears.
This story at Vermont’s WCAX TV exemplifies many of the issues. For starters, it opens with a graphic that reads, “Game wardens sound alarm on bear-human conflicts,” even though the overwhelming, vast majority of these “conflicts” simply involve a bear that has tipped over a garbage or recycling container to get some free food. In the more extreme cases, bears have gotten into cars, garages or even homes that have been left open with food readily available.
In that same news story, game warden Jeremy Schmid said, “The generation of bears that we’re seeing now are ones that have grown up and taught how to gain easy food sources, so we’re dealing with bears that are going into homes, vehicles and getting into trash instead of their natural habitat foraging for food like they’re supposed to.”
Guess what? The generation of bears we are seeing this year isn’t really any different than last year’s or the year before. What IS changing is the way we talk, think about and react to bears. It reminds us of our time working at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic at the University of Minnesota in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when the populations of Canada Geese were recovering after a period when they had been wiped out to near extinction.
In the early 1900’s, Canada Geese were nearly lost as a species, in spite of the fact that when European settlers first arrived in the land that would later become Minnesota there were reports of there being so many of them that flocks of geese could completely blacken the sky. There were no actual population studies done at the time. So, the actual number of geese living in the state when white people arrived will never be known. By nearly any account, it was a whole lot more than we have today, by a large factor.
Over-hunting and the draining of wetlands (their natural habitat) killed nearly all of them. Then, in the 1970’s efforts were taken to restore wetlands, reintroduce Canada Geese around the state, and, like the bear story in Vermont, the recovery of the population was seen as a big success.
In the intervening years, humans built luxurious lakefront homes with heavily manicured lawns, that created ideal habitat for geese. So, guess where the geese went? And, guess what the State of Minnesota did when wealthy home owners began complaining about goose poop in their yards and on their docks?
If you think the State put money into educating homeowners about ways they could deter geese from using their lawns and docks, you would only be partly right. They did a tiny bit of that. More commonly, however, they began throwing around the term “social carrying capacity,” to help justify mass roundups of the geese. (Note: We’ll come back to the term “social carrying capacity” in a minute, particularly as it relates to the bear population in Vermont.)
Minnesota then set up an overtly corrupt system of goose roundups, where the man they paid to round up the geese was the same man they paid to decide if, when and how the geese would be rounded up and destroyed. This guy, who made gobs of cash rounding up and killing geese, had a pretty compelling story to tell. Using a graph showing the population rise of geese, beginning at the lowest point in their numbers up to present day, he made it look like the numbers were rising out of control. He would then state that the geese were exceeding the “social carrying capacity,” which made it sound like geese were overpopulated, when they were not.
To be clear: “social carrying capacity” is not a biological term; “carrying capacity” is. Carrying capacity means the population number the ecosystem can sustain. Social carrying capacity means the number of animals humans will tolerate having around. Most people never understood that distinction. As a result, people began believing that Canada Geese were overpopulated and needed to be rounded up, even though there was no truth to that.
As a result of all of these things, the discussion around geese in Minnesota became very one-sided, so much so that all it would take is one home to call and complain about geese on a lake in order to trigger a roundup of geese. At the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic (WRC), we could get several calls from residents on a lake who wanted the geese to stay. But, because one home had complained, the roundup would happen no matter what they did. And, as a result, we knew our clinic would get an influx of geese with broken wings, legs and other injuries that happened during the roundups. Some of the birds that somehow managed to escape would end up at WRC. The lack of understanding of the actual population numbers, the use of misleading terms, like “social carrying capacity,” and an overall tone that suggested humans were the victims of geese, created a general perception that was completely out-of-step with actual reality. Unimaginable, unnecessary cruelty and expense were the result.
Tragically, that is similar to the story with bears that is currently unfolding in Vermont. Because of the way wildlife officials are talking about bears, including the regular use of the term “social carrying capacity” to describe their numbers, people in Vermont wrongly believe bear populations are continuing to rise to problematic levels. In fact, bear populations peaked in 1990, when, depending on the source you rely on, Black Bear numbers reached between 7,000 and 10,000 animals. Last year’s official Black Bear count in Vermont was just 6,000 - 8,000 bears. In spite of that, most people believe the numbers are still going up. But math is math and numbers are rational and objective. And, the simple fact is that the numbers are not going up. They are remaining flat or going down slightly.
The number of bears is higher than what the state has said it “expects.” But, the number the state “expects,” is a number pretty much pulled out of thin air.
When you, on one hand, raise alarms and hysterics about any animal population, and then on the other hand use the alarm created by misrepresenting the actual science, you are creating a self-fulfilling circular logic that can only lead one direction, and it isn’t a good one. It creates more reports of so-called nuisance encounters and makes people less tolerant of the species, thereby lowering the so-called “social carrying capacity.”
We say this at a time when wildlife officials are debating changes to the bear hunting rules, to among other things, allow the hunting of bears with hounds during their hibernation season. This would effectively allow hunters to use dogs to sniff out entire families of bears incapable of escaping. Even though the proposed rules would only allow a hunter to “take” two of the bears, the rest of the family in a situation like this would likely die as a result of having their hibernation disrupted. Changing these rules at a time when they are also hyping bear interactions and using misleading terms to describe their populations is more than problematic.
Those who would like to weigh in on the bear discussion in Vermont can get more information about how to get involved from Protect Our Wildlife Vermont (POW)