During the holidays, many friends choose to be close to nature, but sometimes we forget to keep a reasonable distance from wild animals, which can lead to danger. For example, a man recently fed a brown bear in the wild, and the result was almost dangerous.
Image taken from Sichuan Observation
The media that reported on such incidents repeatedly used an intriguing headline style to the effect that "after feeding the Internet celebrity wolf, we started feeding the bear again". Regarding the incident of Hoh Xil tourists feeding wolves (please note that the subject of this matter should not be "wolves" but "tourists"), many people have an attitude of not thinking big of a deal to see the excitement, and even speak ill of those who persuade "don't feed", but when feeding brown bears is on the hot search, the sense of crisis is also belated. At least on one thing, netizens have reached a consensus: bears are much more dangerous than wolves. So, just how scary are bears, and what behaviors increase the risk of being attacked by bears? Let's talk about it in detail today.
Is there no heroic hero afraid of bears?
Brown bears are one of the most dangerous large terrestrial animals. First of all, it is large enough, and the larger the animal, the more destructive it is. An autopsy report revealed that a victim who was attacked by a brown bear died of a highly curved and deformed cervical vertebrae due to a slap on the head by a bear's paw. Even if the brown bear does not use fangs and claws, a casual slap with brute force is enough to seriously injure or even kill people.
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Secondly, as people's awareness of conservation increases, the number and range of wild animals, including bears, increases, and the likelihood of encounters with people naturally increases. Nowadays, outdoor sports close to nature are becoming more and more popular, which further increases the possibility of "meeting" between humans and brown bears. In particular, many tourists do not know about animals, and when they encounter bears, they will "stupidly and boldly" go up to feed and take pictures.
Brown bears are also one of the animals that have the highest frequency of conflict with people. Brown bears are considered the most dangerous animals on the Tibetan Plateau. Between 2014 and 2017, Qinghai Province compensated 7,494 cases of property and personal injuries caused by wild animals, of which 42% were caused by brown bears, and 14 of these fatal and injured cases were related to brown bears. Worldwide, 664 brown bear attacks were recorded between 2000 and 2015, with a fatality rate of 14.3%.
Not only brown bears, but all other bears are at the top of the total number of carnivore injuries (with one exception, the polar bear, which has very few reports of attacking people because it is difficult for people to reach it). Even the giant panda, the "messenger of friendship", has a large record of hurting people in the zoo. In short, the attitude towards animals like bears must be careful, careful, and careful.
By the way, the most attacking bear species is not brown bears, but sloth bears, a small species of bear that lives mainly in the India subcontinent. It takes on its main predator, the tiger, and uses a very aggressive strategy to fight back. Because tigers, which make a living by preying on large animals, are very afraid of being injured and affecting their mobility, even if they beat a sloth bear, tigers usually do not fight hard. Unfortunately, when a sloth bear encounters a human, it will also rush up on its own initiative, which has led to many terrible deaths and injuries. Now that we've talked about the dangers of bears, let's talk about what factors increase the risk of bears attacking people.
Are bears stealing picnics cute? No!
Food attraction is the primary risk factor.
There's an animated "Yoga Bear" from Hanna-Barbera Productions, in which the main character, Yoga Bear, is a "repeat offender" who steals tourists' picnics and has forgotten how to forage in the wild. This character has a realistic prototype, and in several protected areas such as Yellowstone National Park and Denhali National Park in the United States, many brown bears and American black bears were attracted by human food (from tourists to scraps from garbage dumps), and bear dumps even became a scene in Yellowstone National Park for a time.
As funny as it may seem like a bear turning over a garbage dump, the lesson of blood later shows how dangerous and foolish it is for bears to associate humans with food. In the history of Yellowstone National Park from 1872 to 2018, there have been eight bear attacks that killed people. One of them was that the bear had a "criminal record" of stealing food from the camp, one was that the bear was foraging for food in the garbage dump not long ago, and the other was that the bear got into the tent to steal food and ended up encountering people on a narrow road.
Surveys conducted in the headwaters of the three rivers on the mainland found that food is also an important cause of human-bear conflicts. Brown bears often break into herders' homes in search of stored food, and dead livestock and food waste attract bears to residential areas. Similar incidents have occurred in Xinjiang and Tibet. At the end of last year, two brown bears broke into the township government of Qimantag Township, Xinjiang (a "township", but in fact there are only two houses, one for the central station of the reserve and the other for the township government, both of which have been invaded by bears).
Although brown bears are omnivores, they generally do not see people as food. In Yellowstone National Park, there has been only one incident of brown bears killing people for predation. If a brown bear kills someone for other reasons, such as food protection or being frightened, it may also eat human flesh, but this is not the same as deliberately killing someone for the sake of eating.
So, the good news is that as long as we don't provide food that attracts it, the bears are much less likely to approach and attack people. In 1970, Yellowstone National Park adopted a Bear Management Program that strictly manages food and waste so that bears don't become interested in people and where people live. In Qinghai, a non-governmental wildlife protection organization, Xuejing, has done a lot of bear prevention work for local herders, one of which is to strictly manage garbage to prevent bears from being lured into residential areas.
The bears are cute, but the mama bears are terrifying!
Interacting with bears in the wild can also be fatal. Females with cubs dare to face any potential threat to their cubs, and if a person makes the mother bear feel this threat, the consequences are often very serious.
On May 19, 2024, at Signal Mountain in Wyoming, United States, tourist Shayne Patrick Burke accidentally alarmed a female brown bear with cubs, and the bear pounced on him and attacked him.
Luckily, Burke was smart enough to bring a pepper spray to repel the bear, and when he was pounced on by a bear, he remembered to protect his neck and other vital parts. He was also lucky that the bear choked on the pepper spray, and he had a signal on his cell phone to contact his wife (who knew first aid and taught him to make a tourniquet with what he had at hand) and rescuers. With a little less luck, Mr. Burke might not survive.
According to an article published in Scientific reports (which, by the way, is the most authorly authorship paper I've ever seen, with 60 authors), 47 percent of brown bear attacks worldwide between 2000 and 2015 were "perpetrators" of female bears with cubs. Nurse-bears are very sensitive and will attack them as a threat to their cubs, as exemplified by Mr. Burke, mentioned at the beginning of this section.
Bear cubs encountered in the wild are so cute that it's easy to overlook how dangerous it is to get close to them. On October 7, 2023, a tourist in Yushu, Qinghai Province, "greets" a female brown bear with her cubs without hindrance, and earlier there was a video of tourists feeding the baby brown bear, with laughter in the background. This reinforces the paradox mentioned above, that after the popularity of outdoor tourism, more and more tourists who do not know about wildlife will come into contact with bears, which will increase the likelihood of injuries.
This can be done as a precautionary measure
The main thing I said earlier was "don't provoke the bear", now let's talk about what proactive precautions we can do.
According to research, another recurrent factor in brown bear attacks around the world is "suddenness", with 20% of attacks involving bears and people being frightened by a sudden encounter. Generally speaking, bears are afraid of people, but their attacks when frightened can be just as deadly.
Therefore, one of the main ideas of bear prevention is to remind the bear of the existence of the bear man as early as possible to avoid sudden encounters with the bear. In places where there are bears, people should move in groups as much as possible and make more noises so that the bears can hear the human voice from a distance and stay away. There are more people, and the eyes of the "scout" also have more eyes, and it is easier to detect the presence of bears. What's more, in the wild, don't leave the road where tourists walk, so as not to "meet the bear" unexpectedly.
Appropriate equipment is also a common way to prevent bears. Burke's example proves that bear spray can be a lifesaver. One of the important jobs of the aforementioned conservation organization Snow Land is to help herders protect their houses with barbed fences, power grids and other equipment, so as to prevent brown bears from entering the house and destroying things, and reduce human-bear conflicts. But brown bears are also constantly trying to break through the defenses, and some even dig holes under the power grid. Wildlife conservation is always dynamic and requires flexibility.
Finally, and a question that many people are interested in, is it okay to kill a bear to "eliminate harm for the people"? The answer is no, because bears are national second-class protected animals and are protected by law, and they cannot harm bears unless they face a threat to their lives.
A paper on human-bear conflict in Sanjiangyuan suggested that if a bear caused unusually much damage, it could be dealt with in a more "violent" way: scare it away with firecrackers and rubber bullets, lock it up and not release it into the wild, or kill it in extreme cases, such as when it threatens the safety of a life. The work of the killings needs to be managed by formal protocols and performed by professionals.
However, we still need to realize that bears are also part of biodiversity, and the so-called "pest for the people" is after all a last resort, and if people do not have unnecessary contact with brown bears, bears themselves can not become "harm". When dealing with nature, more often than not, what we need to learn is how to prevent problems before they happen, why do we have to let the conflict intensify and fight to the death? Behaviors such as "feeding", "playing", "cuddling" and so on, which pose risks to humans and animals, really don't happen anymore.
Planning and production
Author丨Red Queen, popular science creator
Audit丨Huang Chengming, Researcher, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Planning丨Ding Kun
Editor丨Ding Kun
Reviewer丨Xu Lai, Lin Lin