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By MATT STEINER AND JOEL MILLMAN, THE GAZETTE
After killing six bears — two sows and four cubs — that entered homes in Colorado Springs this week, the Colorado Division of Wildlife found itself cast as incompetent managers at best, cold-hearted killers at worst.
“Poor little cubs. They were only looking for food. Why MUST they be euthanized? It just doesn’t seem right. We are in their territory, after all,” a Gazette reader commented online.
Another was accusing. “Murderers,” the reader wrote.
A few of the more 130 who commented online defended DOW, but not many. Why couldn’t the bears have been tranquilized and set loose in the wilderness away from people, or given to a zoo, many asked.
DOW spokesman Michael Seraphin concedes wildlife officials won’t win a popularity contest any time soon, but they aren’t second-guessing themselves, either.
“We don’t like putting bears down,” Seraphin said Friday. “We’re aware there’s resentment. But we can’t manage wildlife based on popular opinion.”
In both instances this week, wildlife officials said they had no choice but to kill the animals because they had shown themselves to be too comfortable around humans, entering houses in search of food as the time nears for them to hibernate.
On Tuesday, two cubs entered a Rockrimmon home while the mother bear prowled outside. All three bears were euthanized.
On Thursday, two cubs entered a home near The Broadmoor hotel while the mother remained outside. Again, DOW euthanized the bears after coaxing them out of the home.
A seventh bear that died this week may have been shot in a tree near the Wildridge Apartments in southwest Colorado Springs or it could have been hit by a car and climbed the tree where it died afterward, Seraphin said, adding black bears’ natural response when scared or hurt is to climb the highest tree they can find.
So far this year, DOW has killed 10 bears in the Pikes Peak region. Last year, 14 were killed between the spring, when the animals awake from winter hibernation and fall, when they fatten up for their month-long sleep.
Once a bear begins associating an effortless meal with people because it’s been fed or can get in unsecured trash or has forced its way into a house, there’s no going back, Seraphin said.
“More often than not, when bears start entering homes, history has shown they will continue that behavior,” he said.
Even those who accepted wildlife officials’ assertion that the bears exhibited dangerous behavior, questioned why the animals weren’t given a second chance, the so-called two-strikes rule, or given to a zoo.
In the past, DOW has tranquilized problem bears, tagged them for identification and relocated them away from people after a first offense.
It’s an option wildlife officials still have but it’s not hard and fast, Seraphin said.
“We can only relocate bears into bear habitat,” he said, noting that if a map of bear habitat in Colorado was laid over a map of where people live “you’d find they are almost exactly identical.”
Moving them to unpopulated wildernesses, as some suggested, isn’t viable, Seraphin said.
Colorado’s high-country wilderness areas, covered primarily by lodge pole pines, are not bear habitat. There would be no food and the bear would starve or be forced to roam to residential areas.
Zoos aren’t interested in black bears, preferring larger predators, like grizzlies, which are a better draw. Those that have black bears have all the bears they need, Seraphin said.
Sanctuaries, like those that take in big cats, also aren’t an option except for abandoned cubs, and then only if they raise the animals without human contact so that the bears remain wild and can be released when they can care for themselves, he said.
DOW is primarily funded through the sale of hunting and fishing licenses, prompting some to suggest that its concern for wildlife begins and ends with game species and hunting seasons.
Hunters harvest about 900 bears a year in Colorado and hunting is a management tool for controlling populations so that they don’t exceed the habitat’s capacity, Seraphin said.
There is some evidence bears in areas that are hunted are more fearful of humans, he said, but it’s not conclusive and it’s not a tool for reducing contact between bears and humans.
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