AR-News: NY Times Op Ed - The New Bear in Town

[Atrak at aol.com]

The New York Times
December 9, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR 
The New Bear in Town
By CHARLES SIEBERT
 
ne day soon we will be reading about a bear sighting in New York City. A 
Manhattan bear is a distinct possibility, should the prospective rogue prove to be 
as venturesome as those coyotes who have been observed crossing various 
bridges into Gotham and dodging late-night taxis on their way toward Central Park. 
Nor can one rule out an ursine visit to Brooklyn, although this would require 
a rare Two-Bridge or Bridge-and-Tunnel Bear. No, the initial encounter is most 
likely to occur in the Bronx, that borough being contiguous with the 
mainland's Eastern corridor, where the black bear has staged such a remarkable 
comeback — some biologists estimate the bear population to be as high as 3,300 in 
northwest New Jersey alone — that the state yesterday opened its first sanctioned 
bear hunt in 33 years.

I imagine our lone Bronx bear hiding by day in the New York Botanical 
Garden's Hemlock Grove, one of the few remaining tracts of natural uncut woodland in 
New York City, and then making a late-night stop at a McDonald's trash bin 
before finally being drawn — by both scent and sensibility — to the bear 
enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. His arrival there would reflect the awkwardness of the 
situation that we and our wild cohabitants in the Eastern United States now find 
ourselves in: a free-roaming bear staring at the ones we cage in order to 
best represent their presumably imperiled state.

A deep disquiet attends the solace we take from hearing of the wild's 
re-emergence within our civil environs: white-tailed deer, coyotes, black bears, even 
bobcats. Their presence seems, at first, to engender a kind of reprieve, as 
though we've finally arrived at a truce with our wild counterparts.

The actual story is more complex and less idyllic. With the steady shift over 
the past century of agriculture to the Midwest and the Plains, along with the 
replacement of wood heat with coal, oil and gas, the East Coast's forests 
have, by and large, been allowed to flourish. And within them have returned many 
of the animals we long ago assumed had been permanently displaced. This 
change, in tandem with the spread of suburbia into those same reforested regions, 
has brought two burgeoning populations (animal and human) face to face. And 
this, of course, is where the trouble begins — where our romanticization of the 
wild gives way to thornier questions about how best to broker the peace with it.

For some recently restored predators in our midst, the peregrine falcon, for 
example, the reinstatement process remains an all-around feel-good story. To a 
falcon — a creature built to hover, both literally and figuratively, above 
the fray — our most audacious spires provide ideal perches and nesting places. 
Some of the city's most deeply entrenched and opportunistic wild cohabitants, 
meanwhile (rats and pigeons), provide the falcon an abundant food source, one 
an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers are happy to part with.

When it comes to a large, wingless, territorial creature like a bear, 
however, things quickly become more complicated. A recent study of the black bears 
living in and around developed parts of the Sierra Nevada has shown that they 
readily become inveterate garbage pickers. The fast-food trash bin, in fact, has 
proved to be such a consistent and abundant food source that these bears have 
stopped hibernating altogether, have switched from their natural daytime 
hunting schedule to an "after hours" foraging routine, and are now beginning to 
show signs of obesity. Many have been found by day sleeping off their binges 
beneath city trees.

In New Jersey, meanwhile, black bear breaking-and-entering incidents have 
nearly doubled in the last five years, rising to 57 so far in 2003 from 29 in 
1998. There has been, as well, a steady surge of nuisance complaints: bears 
rummaging through campsites, attacking livestock, raiding bird feeders and 
beehives, and threatening pets. In 1999, police and wildlife officials euthanized four 
bears; last year, they killed 35. Two attacks on humans were also reported, 
and though neither resulted in serious injury, state officials finally felt 
compelled to react.

In July, the New Jersey Fish and Game Council approved a hunt limited to the 
area roughly defined by Hunterdon, Morris, Passaic, Sussex and Warren 
Counties, all in the northwest part of the state. The decision was not without 
controversy. Specialists called in by the state's environmental commissioner were far 
from unanimous in their support. Some said the rising bear population merited 
a limited yearly hunt that could be sustained indefinitely. Others argued 
that the state's bear census was unreliable and that the hunt should be postponed 
until further studies could be conducted and other options explored. Still, 
the commissioner ultimately decided to back the council's decision, as did a 
reluctant Gov. James E. McGreevy, a Democrat who had won the backing of 
environmental groups in part by promising to protect the state's bears.

Part of the rationale for going ahead with the hunt was that it was better to 
designate the black bear a game animal than a public nuisance. Otherwise, as 
one hunt supporter from Millville, N.J., said at a public hearing last summer, 
the authorities would be pressured to exterminate bears. "Bears will be seen 
as vermin," she said, "and I don't want to see that. I think it is a 
magnificent animal."

Killing a wild animal to secure either our safety or sustenance (bear meat 
has been likened to a somewhat stringy but flavorful steak) could be described 
as a natural extension of our own territorial instincts. Killing an animal in 
order to preserve its magnificence, however — to restore it to its idealized 
status in our minds — somehow seems behavior as cockeyed as that of a 
Dumpster-drunk bear.

Hunting has become its own kind of endangered species, a long-ago ritualized 
form of recreation (not to mention a hefty source of state revenue). But as a 
method of animal-population control and containment it is a shot in the dark. 
Some wildlife experts and bear biologists who were called in to examine New 
Jersey's situation noted that the hunt would eliminate only about 500 bears — 
about as many as were born the previous winter — and therefore make little or no 
dent in the total population. 

It's unclear, too, that by reducing the number of bears we reduce the number 
of fractious encounters with them. New York State has an estimated 5,000 to 
6,000 black bears. Though the state has far more habitat than New Jersey, and 
900 black bears were killed in the annual state-sanctioned hunt last year, New 
York was still the only state in the region to have a fatal bear attack in 
2002. 

Interestingly, even New Jersey's hunters seem to be expressing ambivalence. 
The state made 10,000 permits available, but just over 6,000 hunters applied, a 
response that seems to be attributable, in part, to the high degree of risk 
involved in stalking bear — as opposed to deer, pheasant or duck — and to the 
need for the sort of expertise that, after a 33-year hiatus, relatively few 
sportsmen have. In fact, as part of the application process, the state held 
mandatory seminars to teach applicants bear hunting techniques.

But why not then make similar efforts to educate nonhunting citizens, 
especially those who now find themselves living on the front lines with bears? In 
truth, there aren't a lot of alternatives. Efforts to tranquilize and transport 
bears were abandoned because no other states wanted them. Chemical castration 
and contraception is, by all accounts, still years away from viability. 

Still, simple gestures on our part can minimize the blurring of bear and 
human territory. Bear attacks are territorial, not predatory. And the fact is that 
when left to their own devices, wild bear populations are naturally 
self-limiting. Females are able to reproduce only when their natural habitat provides 
enough food. Older males, meanwhile, routinely kill interlopers that invade 
their territory. But to dissuade those bears that become overly reliant on human 
food sources, people could learn to keep feeders and garbage bins out of 
reach. For its part, the state should require bear-proof enclosures around 
restaurant trash Dumpsters. It should also step up enforcement of a new law that makes 
the feeding of bears illegal. 

As for those bears that prove resistant to all efforts at re-education, 
selective euthanasia by professional sharpshooters is surely a preferable 
alternative to the invariably messy exploits of amateur hunters set loose among an 
indeterminate number of free-roaming bears. 

New Jersey had in fact originally set funds for a program intended to enforce 
the feeding law, to teach residents how to coexist with bears (as millions of 
people across the United States do daily without incident) and to deal with 
problem bears through the use of aversive conditioning methods like chasing 
them with dogs or using pepper spray. The money for that program, however, was 
cut from the budget two years ago, and the state's department of environmental 
protection was forced to make do with a much more modest educational campaign. 

Civilization has somehow brought us to the point where more humans are living 
closer to more wild animals than ever before. We have, in a sense, forced 
ourselves to become naturalists within the very environment we long thought would 
preclude such a role. Only by being better keepers of our nest can we keep 
its wild antidote nearby. Only by better marking and tending to the edges of our 
world can we help the bears hew more closely to theirs: hovering, if not 
above, then at least safely outside the urban fray.  


Charles Siebert is author of "Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral" and the 
forthcoming "A Man After His Own Heart: A True Story."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company