Fuzz, p.5
Fuzz, page 5
“In that instance,” Kurtis adds, “I was struggling on how to do it exactly. I didn’t want to put the cub down and have the mom watch that. I didn’t want to put the mom down and have the baby see that. I ended up darting the baby so it went to sleep. I put the mom down, and then while the baby was asleep, I put it down. That way neither one had to see the other. So.”
When Kurtis says “so” it is shorthand for the many frustrations the job holds. Uncaring homeowners who don’t bother to follow the laws. Who then blame and hound him when a bear crosses a line and is destroyed. Government agencies that would rather pass the buck than spend a buck.
I try to imagine how I would feel if I lived in the house we just left and I had seen how effortless it was for a bear to get in. I ask Kurtis how people usually react. “Some are terrified,” he answers. “Some are nonchalant.” So far, no one in the area has been killed during one of these break-ins. Black bears, by and large, are not aggressive animals. Still, I’m surprised that what sometimes happens when human burglars break into homes hasn’t happened here: homeowner or homeowner’s dog surprises burglar, homeowner and/or dog goes after burglar, burglar panics and kills homeowner.
“Oh, it’s coming,” Kurtis says. Black bears may be no more aggressive than raccoons, but they’re a lot larger.
What if we accepted that risk? What if we chose to live not only with the occasional bear in the kitchen but with the likelihood that someone at some point will be killed by one of those bears? Planes are allowed to operate even though every now and then they crash and people die. One difference is that with airlines, sales revenue covers the expense of lawsuits and insurance. When a bear harms or kills a person, the state wildlife agency may be held liable, and bears, unlike planes, aren’t generating the revenue it would take to cover the costs. There have been a couple of lawsuits recently, one in Utah and another in Arizona, with large payouts to the families of the victims. The agencies had been aware of the bear’s presence in the area but had opted to monitor the situation rather than set a trap.
Breck rolls down his window. “So that’s going to be your limiting factor on that idea.”
Away from the back alleys, Aspen is picturesque and pristine. There are almost as many window boxes as windows, and although we’re closing in on October, I have yet to see anything in them that’s starting to wither or turn brown. It’s like this town has so much money and power that even the laws of nature shrug and surrender. Flowers bloom in fall, and women’s hair goes ash-blond as they age.
Where I see prettiness, Breck sees attractants. “These right here?” Breck points over our heads, to one of the small trees that line the pedestrian walkway where we’ve been questing for an affordable lunch. “Crabapples. The city planted crabapple trees.” People enjoy the profusion of pink spring blossoms. That then turn into bite-sized apples that bears mouth straight off the branch, like cartoon emperors with their clusters of grapes. Black bears show up midday in downtown Aspen regularly enough that the city passed a law making it a ticketable offense to ignore the CPW officer standing guard and go right up to a bear and snap a selfie. Kurtis Tesch’s predecessor tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the city council to replace the crabapple trees. When I got home I stumbled onto an online Aspen Arbor Guide to residential tree selection and planting. Among the recommended species: crabapple, oak, chokecherry, and serviceberry trees. I hesitated to tell Breck. I thought his head might explode.
We locate a moderately priced restaurant that is not one of the eighteen fined for having unsecured garbage and publicly shamed in this week’s Aspen Times. I dig out a list of questions, questions that basically boil down to: What is happening here, and is there an answer? I bring up something Kurtis Tesch said when we were driving back to town. He shared a theory about how the ballot measure that banned Colorado’s spring bear hunt (because it orphaned cubs) had caused the rise in the number of bear conflicts. Breck says he often hears this argument. “There’s a sentiment carried forward by a lot of hunting communities and parks and wildlife people that one way out of this is to hunt our way out of it. But there’s no good science to say that lowering the bear population will lower the number of conflicts.”
For one thing, he says, there’s a mismatch between where the hunters go and where the conflicts are. “Hunting quotas are set according to game management units.” I don’t catch all the details because I’m distracted by some intense celebrity name-dropping at a large table next to ours. I hear: “This game unit has Aspen, Snowmass, Carbondale—” “… Reese Witherspoon—” “They’ll say, ‘Okay, within this unit, harvest × number—’ ” “So then Reese …”
Hunting does alter the behavior of the hunted somewhat, Breck allows, in that it perpetuates fear and avoidance of humans. But Colorado still has a fall bear hunt, so he doesn’t buy less hunting as a reason for the rise in bear conflicts in this case.
It’s worth mentioning that the money for Kurtis’s salary—like most items in state fish and wildlife agency budgets—comes partly from hunting and fishing license fees and taxes on equipment. “I’m not here to criticize that model,” Breck says, “but you have to be aware that that’s underlying all this stuff.”
I am. Somewhat uncomfortably so. In the course of researching this book, I met a lot of good, intelligent people at these agencies, professionals who saw their job as protecting people and animals both. But because of the financial model, it can be hard to set aside the nagging sense that institutional priorities are at play. The money’s coming from hunters, to a large degree—and that makes it hard for agencies to win the trust of everyone else. (And creates perplexing mottoes like “Support Nevada’s Wildlife … Buy a Hunting and Fishing License.”)
Breck shakes open his napkin. There’s legislation making its way through Congress that would add a billion-plus dollars in federal funds to wildlife agency coffers. The money would be earmarked for conservation-oriented projects. “Which would alter that dynamic.”
We skim our menus. At the next table, they’re on Miley Cyrus. (“She’s amazing.” “She is amazing.”) Breck is constitutionally immune to the distraction. On the drive over, I had asked about Aspen celebrities. I got: “Jack … Nicholson. Nicklaus? Which one is the golfer?” He knew that Kevin Costner has a place, because Kevin Costner once had a bear problem.
Breck puts his menu down. “The thing that’s not being talked about enough is this. You have a recovering bear population that was suppressed mightily at the beginning of the last century.” The prevailing attitude toward America’s wildlife in the early part of the twentieth century had changed little since settlers first crossed the divide. The first to push west were ranchers, subsistence farmers, cattlemen, fur trappers. Wild animals were either a commodity or they were varmints. Bounties were widespread. Bears were routinely poisoned, up through the 1970s. “We wiped out everything,” Breck says.
The government was there to help. Breck’s employer, the National Wildlife Research Center, has had many incarnations and names over the past hundred and fifty years but always one goal: effective, cost-efficient wildlife damage control. Whether the wild animals were predators taking livestock or birds and rodents helping themselves to crops; whether the name on the door was Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy or Eradication Methods Laboratory or Division of Predatory Animal and Rodent Control, the goal was to help the rancher and farmer. What looked like pure wildlife biology—studies of animal behavior, food habits, migratory patterns–was biology in service of prosperity.
With the birth of environmental and animal welfare movements in the 1960s and ’70s, a national conscience began to emerge. Activists pushed back against practices like den-shooting and airdrops of strychnine-laced bait. In 1971, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Humane Society of the United States sued to end the use of poisons in predator control. The following year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) canceled registrations for strychnine and two other predacides. Advocacy groups sparked a shift in public sentiment, which over time has become impossible—and impolitic—to ignore.
A growing percentage of Americans feel a strong emotional connection to wild animals and disapprove of their destruction for economic reasons. In 1978, three thousand Americans were asked to rate their like or dislike of twenty-six different animal and insect species. In 2016, researchers at Ohio State University readministered that same survey. Compared to the first go-round, the proportion of respondents who reported liking wolves and coyotes was up by 42 and 47 percent, respectively. (The cockroach had also risen in popularity, from most despised—that honor now going to the mosquito—to second most-despised.)
Which is a gassy way of saying: bears are back. To the point where they’re starting to get all up in people’s worlds. “This is new territory for wildlife biologists,” Breck says, forking salad greens. “And we’re not very good at it. When I was an undergrad it was all about, How do we bring these populations back? How do we count them, manage them? Now it’s all about human-wildlife interactions. How do we manage this? We’re seeing wildlife biologists going …” Breck mimes banging his head against the table. “The game has changed.”
At the moment, it feels unwinnable, this game. There are more bears, more wolves and coyotes, and ever more humans moving into their ranges. And no cultural consensus on what should be done when one of those animals ransacks a kitchen or kills some sheep or nips a steakhouse owner’s backside. We have human-wildlife conflict and human-human conflict. We have ranchers and farmers and animal lovers hating on each other in a cultural clash that can feel as dug-in as the politics in this country. Kill them all! Don’t harm a single one!
Breck and other specialists in human-wildlife conflict are starting to move their focus from animal biology and behavior over to human behavior. As a science, it’s called human dimensions. The goal, stated unscientifically, is to find pathways to compromise and resolution. It often begins by bringing together people who aren’t normally in the same room and getting them to listen to and even empathize with one another. Breck recently co-founded the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence. In early 2020, the center organized a two-day gathering of hunters, trappers, ranchers, and representatives of conservation and animal welfare groups to talk about reintroducing wolves in Colorado.
Breck came away hopeful. By the end of the second day, he was hearing people talk without hostility and in ways that struck him as productive. “The question now is, What happens when everyone goes back to their own corners?” Breck’s hope is that whatever path the state pursues, it will be a decision reached by a group like this, rather than a few legislators in a back room.
Lately Breck has been spending time with Zach Strong, director of Carnivore Conservation at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The NRDC’s more standard approach to Wildlife Services has been to sue them. Breck encouraged Strong to forge a relationship with the Wildlife Services director in Montana. Partly as a result of this unlikely pairing, three nonlethal—or “wildlife conflict-prevention”—specialist positions were created within Wildlife Services, two in Montana and one in Oregon. By showcasing the effectiveness of these hires, NRDC and Defenders of Wildlife were able to secure federal funds for hiring and evaluating similar positions in ten other states. Breck is hopeful that the new developments at Wildlife Services signal a shift within the culture there. Meanwhile, the Fish and Game Department in Idaho still funds a hunter-and rancher-friendly nonprofit that offers bounties on wolves.
All the government agencies agree on one thing: the fate of a wild animal that kills a human. Might even this someday change? Are there places in this world where the consensus favors sparing the animal’s life, particularly in the case of a defensive attack? Bear biologist Dave Garshelis has been spending time on the Tibetan plateau, where brown bears routinely break into the homes of herders who have left for the summer to graze their stock. “They’d come back and the house would be a wreck, completely demolished. But these people are strict Buddhists and they don’t want any retribution.” Garshelis told me about a conversation he had with the local officer who responds in cases of animal attacks. “I asked him, ‘What if you were called to a situation where you saw a bear on top of a person, mauling a person? Would you shoot the bear?’ And he said, ‘I don’t have the right to decide whose life is more important, the person or the bear.’ ”
In India, around five hundred people are killed every year in encounters with wild elephants. Government policy is to compensate the families but not, with few exceptions, to destroy the elephant. The state with the highest numbers—403 deaths in the past five years—is West Bengal. Maybe some answers are there, too.
* You may be wondering: When you live off your own fat, do you need to use the toilet? If you are a bear, you do not. Hibernating bears reabsorb their urine and form a “fecal plug.” Cubs, on the other hand, let it go inside the den. Not a problem, because the mother bear eats it—partly as cleanup, but mostly as food. She is nursing, after all. While hibernating. Black bear hibernation isn’t the same as sleep. They’re just sort of slowed down and out of it. Surreally, black bear sows give birth halfway through their hibernation. They deliver a couple of cubs, snack on the placenta, then go back into hibernation, nursing and tending their cubs in a state of semi-alertness until spring. According to a scientist who has taken blood samples from hibernating black bears, they do not have sleep breath and their dens don’t stink. They smell like roots and earth and that is all.
† Taser International briefly sold a wildlife taser, the X3W, that some thought held promise as a hazing tool. The devices were purchased mainly to be used as they are on humans, to gain control in a threatening situation without necessitating the firing of a lethal weapon. The item sold poorly, a company representative told me, because it was costly and because it only worked on very tall mammals—a moose, or a bear on its hind legs—and at a distance of less than 25 feet. (Otherwise one of its two probes, the downwardly aimed one, would hit the ground.) The impetus for the X3W was an agitated moose whose calves were stuck in an open house foundation. The moose had chased Larry Lewis, of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and a state trooper three times around the patrol car, when the trooper pulled out his Taser. The moose was stunned, recovered, and ran off, allowing Lewis to safely extract the calves. Impressed, he contacted the Taser people and worked with them to design a wildlife version that was safety-tested at the Kenai Moose Research Center (“a world leader in moose science”). Tasing was found to be less stressful to the animal than tranquilization, and safer in that there’s no risk of killing it by overdose. (Darts are filled according to an estimate of the animal’s weight.) So it seemed like a promising alternative when a situation develops quickly and lives are at stake, or when a moose has “a chicken feeder stuck on its head”—the example Lewis provided for Alaska Fish & Wildlife News.
‡ I understand the desire on the part of those whose job sometimes requires them to kill an animal to avoid that verb. Kill has a taint of murder. The sheer number of euphemisms suggests a long-running struggle to find something right. I collected them for a while: cull, take, dispatch, remove, lethally remove. As a word person, I balk at euthanize, which implies the relief of suffering, and harvest, which makes animals sound like corn. I heard one person say “use lethal force on,” which seems better suited to SWAT operations and Gary Busey movies.
3
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Manslaughter by the Pound
In India there’s a thing called an “awareness camp.” I first heard the term from a researcher at the Wildlife Institute of India who runs elephant and leopard awareness camps. I imagined a camp in the American sense, with bunk beds and marshmallows, and I tried to meld this in my head with large, dangerous animals. Naturally I wanted to go. As it turns out, an awareness camp is closer to a national awareness day. I’ve seen listings for dengue fever awareness camps, diabetes awareness camps, traffic safety awareness camps, and at least one Snoring and Sleep Apnea Awareness Camp, which sounds like our bedroom. They’re informational gatherings with the aim of making people aware of dangers they may not know much about or prefer not to think about and offering guidance in how best to avoid or survive them.
Every December that researcher, Dipanjan Naha, locks up his office in Dehradun, slaps a Government of India on duty placard on a hired four-wheel drive, and heads out on a sort of awareness camp road trip. This year his cousin Aritra is coming along as his assistant, and I’m in the car, too. We’re starting in North Bengal—confusingly, a region of West Bengal—where each year, wild elephants kill, on average, 47 people and injure another 164. Forty-seven people per year, in an area the size of Connecticut. India’s forest department has wildlife rangers that get involved in these cases, but they don’t kill the elephant. A few rangers will be on hand at Naha’s first awareness camp, in the village of Bamanpokhri. I’m eager to learn what it is they do.
Outside the car window, agriculture rolls by: tea plantations, marigold farms, neat rows of rice plants set in the earth like toothbrush bristles. Small villages punctuate the paddies and plots—homes of corrugated metal and thatch, a temple, a few open-front bodegas. Cows loiter in the roads and small black goats are parallel-parked along the sides, but I see no other animals, no logical setting for elephants.
Elephants! Naha assures me they’re not far off. It’s winter, the time of year when herds are on the move. They forage at night and sleep by day in patches of teak and lal—remnants of the forests that once stretched from the Indian state of Assam through North Bengal all the way to the eastern border of Nepal. This “elephant corridor” has since been fractured and diminished, first by the many sprawling tea estates planted by the British and more recently by military bases and settlements of refugees and immigrants from Nepal and Bangladesh. Ever more humans are coming into these forests to cut wood and graze their livestock, turning elephant habitat into human. In their attempts to cross the land, the elephants encounter barriers, dangers, dead ends. The corridor is now a pinball game. Herds can become isolated in a single pocket of forest. They become “pocketed elephants.” Keeping elephants in a pocket is as ill-advised as it sounds. The gene pool stagnates and the population density spikes. Soon there’s not enough food to support them. They wander into villages to eat what they can find, and what they find is people’s crops and granaries. Hello, human-elephant conflict.
