Non-lethal Management of Black Bears to Alleviate Human-Bear Conflicts: Human Education and Hazing with Dogs
Loading...
Authors
Reich, Heather
Issue Date
2024
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Black bears (Ursus americanus), once extirpated across most of their range in North America, have been a conservation success story. Since the early 1900s, black bear populations have been recovering and reincorporating historical ranges (Beckmann & Lackey, 2008). As black bear populations and occupied range expand, human populations are also expanding into black bear habitat. Urban development within occupied black bear range is leading to increased human-bear conflict. This conflict may involve bears getting into garbage and bird feeders, yet interactions may escalate and include property damage and human injury. As charismatic megafauna, bears elicit a strong emotional response from the public that often demands non-lethal management of bears involved in conflict with humans. These public responses challenge management agencies to find management techniques that will help keep bears at a low level of conflict while keeping the public safe. Management techniques include education and outreach along with physical management of individual bears. With this demand for non-lethal management of bears, I investigated the benefits and costs of education and outreach along with different hazing options for black bears. Reviewing 54 different publications, we found room for both techniques combined to be advantageous to bears and plausible options for management of human-bear conflicts. Furthermore, I studied the use of dogs as a form of hazing for bears. Dogs as a non-lethal management tool is gaining in popularity among agencies that manage bears. There is lack of data on the use of dogs for hazing bears and few published studies compared the use of dogs coupled with less-lethal ammunition or the dogs alone (Beckmann et al., 2004; Leigh & Chamberlain, 2008; Comeau, 2013; Klip 2018). I had the opportunity to investigate how to use dogs to get the best response from bears treated by dogs. I used 3 treatments to apply to bears: 1) releasing dogs off-leash to pursue and potentially make physical contact with the bear, 2) releasing the bear with dogs on-leash to pursue the bear with no potential for contact, and 3) a control group of bears released without dogs involved. After the treatments, I looked at how many days it took an individual bear to return to chronic conflict and the percentage of time treated bears spent in residential areas after release. My study found no significant difference between treatments and the variables examined. Despite the lack of support for the hypotheses presented in this study, dogs have benefits as part of a bear management program. These benefits include opportunities for education and outreach by drawing the public to them, safety for handlers and law enforcement in situations involving an injured human or bear, field assistance for finding injured or orphaned wildlife, dropped collars, or carcass location. Ultimately, this study should provide added information to managers considering incorporating dogs into their human-bear conflict programs.