Ursids Archives | JuneauNature

S’eek, Xóots (black & brown bear)

Discovery has a deep relationship with bears. In the mid-1990s, about a decade after our founding, we were asked by the City to serve as a sort of ‘bear ambassador‘ to the schools. Throughout the District, we promoted more respectful and less fearful attitudes to animals we consider our teachers.

During construction of Dzantik’i Héeni Middle School, CBJ project managers asked Steve Merli and me to interview the borough’s many bear experts, assembling their perspectives into a booklet addressing bear-human relations. The request was triggered by a growing problem at Eix’gul’héen, creek at end of slough/warmsprings creek (Switzer) where the school was planned. Poor garbage sequestering led to escalating encounters and an epidemic of bear deaths. Managers we spoke with resisted the term “problem bears,” preferring “problem people.”

If there were a single light-bulb moment to share from the writing of About bears, for me that’d be a conversation with John Neary, longtime Discovery supporter and then a manager at Pack Creek bear observatory. John pointed us to a semantic and conceptual distinction that few Alaskans then understood. I’m sorry to say that in the subsequent quarter century our outreach efforts haven’t substantially reduced the frequency of these misleading pronouncements. I’m referring to the terms habituation and food-conditioning.

In human or animal behavior study, habituation describes growing relaxation. It’s incorrect to say that a bear is “habituated to garbage.” Habituated animals could almost be described as ‘bored,’ and garbage isn’t boring to a bear. Regular encounters with nonthreatening humans leads to habituation, which is actually the desired outcome at carefully monitored settings like Steep Creek at the Glacier Visitor Center.

The correct term for the opposite of habituation—growing attraction—is conditioning. A bear obsessed with garbage is food-conditioned. While habituation is a relaxing response, food conditioning is an increasingly pushy response to a tasty reward. That generally leads to execution. In the clip above, modifications to the compost enclosure ‘solved’ the problem from our human perspective. But the bear is probably dead.