About a year and a half ago, in September 2014, I took a photo of a black bear standing in a yard just across the street from the Governor’s Mansion. Transfixed by a totem raising ceremony in a parking area off Willoughby Ave. below, the bear’s ears perked to the Tlingit drumming and chanting.
More than any photo I’ve ever posted on Facebook, it went viral, with about 500 shares. It was viewed by tens of thousands of Facebook users. The Empire printed the photo as well, with strongly positive responses.
Clearly, people love bears — to death as it turns out.
I spoke of this photo at a recent meeting of an informal group, the Bear Committee, which includes several public employees tasked with keeping track of bears roaming our community. They told me with certainty that the bear I had photographed was dead; that it was an incorrigible repeat offender and had to be put down.
This surprised me. The summer of 2014 happened to be one of the least troublesome for our neighborhood in many years. Those of us in our neighborhood had adopted much more stringent control of garbage,
A few days after I took the photograph, I was walking up the stairway from Capital Avenue and saw the same bear at the base of an apartment building. The bear was looking up at a tenant who was dropping food to it from a third-story window.
I realized then that control of garbage containers would not be enough. The apartment manager had taken efforts that summer to secure the building’s dumpster, but had little control over such tenant behavior.
Any bear habituated to urban areas has to be taken out — sometimes physically if a first offender, but those that return will keep coming back, and for the public’s safety, they have to be killed. Black bears may be cute, but these are wild animals much stronger and quicker than we are.
My regret is that I didn’t blister my neighboring tenant with harsh words and follow-up with a police report.
If you love bears, don’t feed them or allow access to your garbage. Admonish those that do. Allowing bears access to food is the equivalent of giving them poison. Remember: our food kills bears.
• Peter Metcalfe lives in Juneau.
