the forest.Onemorning in June,
he returned and ripped the door off a properly latched
U-Haul trailer.
“At thatpoint,we’re like,‘OK,we’ll trya last-ditcheffort,’
and scheduledcrew tobeon24/7,”Leahy says.“For aweek,
somebodyonour team iswith thebear thewhole time try-
ing to scare him back into the wild.We did 28 negative
conditioning events that week.”Eventually,Leahywrote a
memo to theparksuperintendentoutlining theeffortsmade
to save the animal and asking for permission tokill it.“We
put inmore effort thanmost placeswouldhave the timeor
moneyor care todo,”he says.“But that’sour job.”
Animal-rightsgroups,ofcourse,objecttoeuthanizingbears
for behavior causedbyhuman fecklessness,but it isnotable
that People for the Ethi-
cal Treatment of Animals
spokeswoman Stephanie
Bell praises the extensive
efforts at negative condi-
tioning as “very effective at
saving bear lives.”However,
some bear-management
experts, includingHopkins,
believe the cost in time and
resources of focusing on
individual bears that aren’t
likely to be rehabilitated
anyway iswasteful.“Hazing
bears isoftenabigshow,”he
says. “Moving bears around
andputting collars on them
is not effective. It doesn’t
change theirbehavior.”
Nevertheless, Leahy’s
mandate is to try to save
these bears—and he is
hauntedbythefailures.Ona
corkboardabovehisdesk in
the cluttered trailer where
his staff works are the tags
taken from some of the
bears he has had to eutha-
nize after unsuccessful
efforts to rehabituate them
into the wild. Purple-33
washis first,back in2005,whenhewasanentry-level field
biologist at Sequoia. “That bear was maybe 15months
old,” he recalls,“and somebody startedhand-feedingher,
so the bear started approaching lots of people. It culmi-
nated inme trying to catch thebear tomove it.She came
right up tomy car, started crawling inmy driver’s side
window.Iheldmybreath andblastedherwithbear spray
and she ranoff.Wecameback in themorning,and shewas
in our trap.Sowe killed it.You can’t have bears crawling
intopeople’s cars.”
Those moments—and the tags that remind him of
them—arewhatdrives the33-year-old,whospenthisyouth
working, hunting, and frolicking near his family’s home
in the rural,westernNewYork town of Randolph. It’s so
serious to him that he bristles when touristsmake jokes
about bears. “I can’t tell you howmany times we get Yogi
Bearcomments,”he says.“It’snot funny tous.This is lifeor
death for thesebears.”WhenIask in jestwhetheruntagged
bearsmake fun of the ones with collars and antennae, he
curtly replies,“Wedon’t anthropomorphizebears.They’re
not people.”
GREEN-7LIESPRONE
andunconsciousonagreen tarpon
the paved driveway of theWildlifeManagement office, a
teamof five staffersgatheredbehindher for agroupphoto
that none of themwill be
permitted to post on social
media.It’sabad image,even
if thebearwindsup livinga
good,long life thanks to the
intervention.
The celebratory atmo-
sphere is understandable,
though.Itwasaparticularly
difficult day at Yosemite,
one in which a pair of
sleeping teens were killed
when amassive treebranch
fell on their tent, and a
campgroundwasshutdown
because squirrels there
tested positive for plague.
“This,”Leahy says, “is the
best thing that’s happened
in this park all day.”
Two weeks later, Leahy
is more optimistic about
Green-7 thanhewaswhen
wewere in themidst of the
capture.When thebearwas
caught, he was convinced
it must have been fed to
be so comfortable in such
close proximity to people.
But while the bear’s radio
transmitter has shown her
near the campgrounds again,shehasn’t come inandhasn’t
made any aggressive efforts to obtain human food.The
worst thing that happened, he says, is that she caused a
small traffic jambycrossinga road,but“she ranawaywhen
she saw us.Being capturedwas obviously a very negative
experience for her.So that’s good.”
»
CONTINUEDFROMPAGE98
ARANGERWITHANOIL-PELLETGUN, ANON-LETHALTOOLUSED
FOR CONDITIONINGBEARS TO STAY CLEAROF CAMPGROUNDS
99
OutofrespectfortherangersatYosemiteNationalPark,AnnArbor,
Michigan–based journalist
SteveFriess
willrefrain frommaking
any“smarter than theaveragereporter” jokeshere.
