Wild bears so habituated to the presence of people that the biologists who have come here to study them say they’ve never seen anything like it — bears that lift the door handles of trucks to take possession of the cabs; bears that manage to snag the bait from a trap with one foot while holding the steel gate open with the other; bears that stroll munificently through the crowds at the Canada Day parade; bears in the pubs, the hotels, the day-care centers, the landfills, meat lockers, grease vents, underground parking garages. In Whistler, if a bear doesn’t get into something humans are guarding, it’s usually because too many other bears got there first.
The New York Times Magazine writes about The Bears Among Us. Another excerpt:
Bear managers and park wardens have tried aversive conditioning before: in Banff, for instance, they used to drive up to bears eating roadside vegetation and blast them with water cannons. But as St. Clair points out, that kind of hazing not only violates several principles of animal learning theory (among them, that punishment should be immediate, consistent and not signaled in advance); all it ultimately teaches a bear is that, through a series of our bylaws, the only humans who will hurt it are humans in uniforms arriving in trucks between the hours of 9 and 5.
As NewMexiKen has written before, bears are so intelligent that in another generation or two they’ll be ordering food over the internet.
“I’m on ur ‘puter, gettina pizza”