The effort to locate the bear that attacked a school group near Bella Coola, B.C., last Friday is on. What happens after that is still in question.
Bear encounters are not rare in Canada, especially on British Columbia’s Central Coast. However, attacks like the one last week that involve large groups are, according to conservation experts CBC News spoke to.
But there’s still discussion and debate about what could or should happen to the bears involved if they’re found and definitively linked to the incident.
How do they find the bear?
There are about 13,000 grizzlies living in B.C., many of them in the central coast region.
The area near 4 Mile subdivision on the traditional territories of the Nuxalk Nation where last Friday’s attack occurred has what’s considered a pretty high bear population — about 22 bears per 1,000 square kilometres, according to provincial counts.
B.C. Conservation teams track where bears are moving, set bait in locations they expect they’ll be, and set up traps.
Once a bear has been captured and immobilized, officers work to match the animal to witness accounts and evidence collected at the scene of an attack — including tracks, hair, or anything the bear might have bitten down on during the incident.
“Even further, the bears left some forensic evidence on the clothing of the victims,” said Kevin Van Damme, inspector with the B.C. Conservation Officer Service (BCCOS). “From there … we’ll do lab work to make sure that we have the right bear.”
What might have provoked the attack?
According to grizzly experts, as the size of a group of people goes up, the less likely it is that a bear will attack.
Brian Falconer of B.C.’s Raincoast Conservation Foundation says that to his knowledge, there has never been an attack by a grizzly bear on a group of more than six people.
“This is not rare,” he said of the Bella Coola attack that involved at least 20 people. “This is unique.”
He says we may never know what caused the bear to attack. He says bears have different personalities and comfort levels in terms of personal space.
“It depends if you’re protecting cubs. If you’ve just had a battle with another male to protect your cubs, you’re on hyper alert.”
Authorities have not indicated whether anyone in the group that was attacked ran, which experts say could also heighten a bear’s reaction.
According to a statement from BCCOS last Friday, “Multiple teachers physically intervened, using bear spray and a bear banger, to drive the bear away.”
“Thankfully, the teachers were prepared,” Van Damme said at a news briefing the same day. “They did everything they needed to do and they avoided serious injuries to others.”
Sgt. Jeff Tyre with the B.C. Conservation Officer Service says that, based on information officials received, there is ‘likely a sow and two cubs involved’ in the attack on a school group in Bella Coola. No bears have yet been trapped, he added.
What happens once the grizzlies are found?
Van Damme says a number of professionals will work together to determine next steps after the bears are found, including the province’s wildlife veterinarian, large carnivore specialist and wildlife biologist.
“The big part will be the assessment of the bear,” he said in an interview Monday with CBC’s Ian Hanomansing.
Doing that will potentially determine “why did this bear do something that we just don’t see with bear behaviour,” said Van Damme. “We won’t know any outcomes until we get more analysis completed.”
Falconer expects the community where the students and teachers in the attack were from will also be consulted.
The Nuxalk Nation has coexisted with bears for thousands of years, he says, and may not feel the best solution is just to kill the offending bear.
Three students and one teacher were hospitalized Thursday when a bear attacked a group of about 20 people in Bella Coola — a community about 420 kilometres northwest of Vancouver. Bella Coola Valley resident Tanyss Munro says she and other residents are fearful because of the dangers grizzly bears pose.
Until the bear is definitively identified and the circumstances around the attack become more clear, it’s impossible to say if the bears will be relocated or euthanized.
Falconer says, most often when there have been injuries, the bear is put down.
If it is a mother with cubs, experts say the age of the cubs will likely be part of the assessment, too, and could influence the decision.
How does relocation work?
If the decision is to move the bear, there are two ways this is done.
Relocation is most often done to “buy time” so that humans can remove anything that is attracting bears to the area, said Lana Ciarniello, an independent conservation scientist and co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) human-bear conflict expert team.
For example, if someone has things like garbage, live chickens or even fruit trees in their yard, it could attract bears. Capturing the animals and moving them about 10 to 20 kms away gives humans an opportunity to install bear-proof garbage cans or electric fencing.
“We want to give the bear a chance and some time because this is a human problem that the bear is capitalizing on.”
The bear will likely come back, Ciarniello says, but if it doesn’t find anything to eat, it will most likely move on.
Translocation refers to moving bears a great distance from the attack spot, with the goal of not having it return. That may mean moving a bear hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away, sometimes even across a mountain range.
But according to Ciarniello, that’s still not always a guarantee that the bear won’t come back.
“There’s a male, big male, that was moved from Southwest B.C. years ago, decades ago, and they tracked his return. He was moved like thousands of kilometres — and he came all the way back.”
Ciarniello says that rather than relocating and translocating bears, it would be better to “start addressing the root cause of all these conflicts.”
She says that means better management of non-natural foods and things like garbage and unsecured chicken coops.
Is the attack related to end of trophy hunt?
Since Friday’s attack, there have been calls to bring back B.C.’s grizzly bear trophy hunt, which the provincial government ended in 2017. Only First Nations are allowed to kill grizzlies pursuant to Indigenous rights, for food, social or ceremonial purposes.
The BC Wildlife Federation, which advocates for bringing back the hunt, says without it, “the number of problem grizzlies increases.”
Falconer disagrees, saying killing hundreds of bears because of the actions of one will not make anyone safer.
“Opening up the trophy hunting and killing 350 bears a year all around the province in retribution for that is not an answer.”
Ciarniello also notes that the bear involved in the recent attack could turn out to be a female with cubs.
“Females with cubs were never allowed to be hunted,” she said. “So these bears wouldn’t have been removed from the population.”
When asked Monday if the government is considering bringing back the trophy hunt, B.C. Environment Minister Tamara Davidson said that even when the hunt was open, it didn’t typically take place in areas where attacks were happening.
“So this might not be a solution,” she said. “The solution right now is to locate the bear.”
