Support the Timberjay by making a donation.

Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

If you want to be feared, you’d better git your gun!

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 3/25/15

For millennia, the typical state of most species of wildlife was to be highly fearful of humans. And from an evolutionary standpoint, that was a beneficial behavioral adaptation, since for thousands …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

If you want to be feared, you’d better git your gun!

Posted

For millennia, the typical state of most species of wildlife was to be highly fearful of humans. And from an evolutionary standpoint, that was a beneficial behavioral adaptation, since for thousands of years the sudden appearance of a human meant imminent death or injury for most animals.

Of any creature that’s ever walked the Earth, none has proven to be as effective a killer as Homo sapiens, and it was, therefore, only common sense that animals fled at the mere sight or smell of us.

But times have changed. Humans don’t kill most animals on sight anymore. In fact, the vast majority of humans don’t intentionally kill wild animals ever, save for the occasional mouse that finds its way indoors in the fall.

Our reaction to wild creatures has changed dramatically in the past half century, and that fact has, just as dramatically, changed how wild creatures react to our presence. Forty years ago, whitetail deer were rare in the Twin Cities suburbs, since deer were still largely fearful around human. But over the course of the past quarter century, deer have moved into the city in unprecedented numbers, and today can be found regularly right in Minneapolis.

And the deer are not alone. The list of animals once relegated to wild places that have found new habitat in suburbia or even urban areas continues to grow every year. From bald eagles to coyotes, from raccoons to black bears, animals once routinely persecuted by humans, have increasingly taken advantage of our changing behavior, and learned to live among us.

Despite this rather obvious change in the behavior of many of our wild neighbors, we still have too many wildlife professionals who cling to long-taught, but increasingly outdated, theories about what’s “natural” when it comes to animal behavior. We’re told routinely by the Department of Natural Resources that a bear should flee whenever a human appears, and that any behavior that’s different from that is evidence that somebody has messed with nature’s plan.

I haven’t bought into that simplistic theory for a long time. If fear of humans were the natural state of wild creatures, the dodo might still be with us today.

For most animals throughout history, fear of humans was a learned response developed over time, not some innate instinct over which they had no control. Animals, as we’ve discovered in recent years, are far more intelligent than we’ve given them credit for. And bears, like so many wild creatures, live in a world into which humans are increasingly encroaching. If they were the simple automatons that scientists once described, we would expect them, quite naturally, to vanish from the woods as summer homes and cabins increasingly populate many parts of our region.

But bears aren’t disappearing, they are habituating (defined as growing accustomed to something) to our presence, as is happening with so many other species of wildlife.

And that’s a process that’s going to happen whether or not people intentionally feed bears. Imagine a bear living in the woods near Lake Vermilion, Pelican Lake, or Eagles Nest, where cabins dot the lakeshores and surrounding woods. A day must rarely go by when one of these bears doesn’t encounter the sight, sound, or the smell of human activity. For these bears, running in terror every time they encountered a human in some form or fashion would be a useless expenditure of energy— unless humans really did pose mortal danger.

In that sense, bears are no different from us. I don’t run away each time I see someone walking down the sidewalk in my direction, but if one out every three pedestrians headed my way took out a shotgun and started firing, I’d change my behavior in a hurry.

In the debate over bears in places like Eagles Nest Township, we hear frequently from those who say they like seeing bears, but want them to run away once shooed— and they blame Lynn Rogers or others who feed bears when they don’t.

But those who want bears to run from their presence overlook the fact that such behavior can only be maintained in the long run if most humans begin killing bears again as the solution to what is, in reality, a minor nuisance problem. It is, after all, not “natural” that a bear run from the sight of a human, such behavior is only an artifact of centuries of human persecution of bears. And bears are far too intelligent to continue to exhibit behavior that is no longer relevant to their experience with the vast majority of humans.

It doesn’t take an intelligent animal long to figure out when something in their environment is a threat, and when it is not. A scarecrow propped up in a farmer’s field works for a few days at best, before becoming little more than a convenient perch for the crows.

For a bear living in a populated area, such as Eagles Nest Township, the prospect of a human banging a pot might be scary the first couple times, but by the third or fourth exposure, most bears would relegate it to background noise, certainly not something that would cause it to flee. That’s because bears are capable of learning from past experience. If their experience is that the banging of a pot is followed by a little cursing before a frustrated human retreats back into their house, there’s no reason for a bear to quit what it’s doing to flee for its life.

If you want bears to run when they see you, you should become an advocate for a return to the old ways of handling bears— i.e shooting them indiscriminately. That’s what made them afraid of us in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting a return to the bad old days of shooting bears on sight— I’m for live and let live.

But the uncomfortable truth is, if you want to be feared, you’ve got to be willing to be the meanest son-a’-bitch in the valley, and for millennia that’s exactly what humans represented on this planet. If you want, on the other hand, to live in peace with your wild neighbors, as most of us do these days, then live with them, and get used to their occasional irritations and inconveniences.

Realistically, it’s one or the other. You can’t have it both ways.