This story by PJH assistant editor, Grace Hammond, appeared in this week's Planet:

Moran residents question Game and Fish's bear protocol

Thursday, November 01, 2007

By Grace Hammond

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-A Pacific Creek man is demanding that the Wyoming Game & Fish Department justify with policy and procedure its fatal removal of a black bear from his neighborhood last week.

According to a Game & Fish press release dated Oct. 24, a young male black bear had been trapped after it had “broken into and damaged a number of outbuildings and gotten into both bird and livestock feed.” The bear, the release said, had a history of frequenting homes in the area, including visiting porches, testing windows and tearing the panels off the garage door of an occupied home on two occasions.

“History clearly shows that a bear such as this would only continue with the same behavior if relocated,” Mark Bruscino, the regional manager and the one who handled the call, stated in the press release.

Bruscino explained over the phone that the call to Game & Fish came after the bear tore holes in the doors of a family’s attached garage while they were home two nights in a row. The second night, it climbed under a car blocking the doors to get to them.
On Oct. 23, Bruscino trapped the bear and euthanized it later that night with a lethal injection.

But Gary Shockey, a resident of the subdivision near Moran, said the bear did not pose “an imminent threat” to humans. While it had broken into his garage twice, it never charged a person or showed aggression, he said.

“This bear ran from humans,” Shockey said. “I tried to pepper spray him and I couldn’t get close enough.”

He believes that there should be a mandatory review process for “kill decisions.”
“We have a difference in opinion about whether this bear posed a threat,” said Mark Gocke, Wyoming Game & Fish’s Public Information Specialist. “It was [the department’s] professional judgment that the type of behavior it was exhibiting did not make it a candidate for relocation.”

Shockey was concerned that the wrong bear might be caught and that the bear was doomed for euthanization the moment the trap was set because, he said, Bruscino indicated to him that there was nowhere to hold it while an investigation was conducted.
Bruscino said, however, that he told Shockey the bear “couldn’t be held long-term, but of course we can keep a bear overnight or long enough to get all the information in hand.”

Shockey said he and his wife “pleaded” with Bruscino at their home to relocate the bear and that the couple even offered to help. Shockey stated that he didn’t give Bruscino the “the whole story” of the bear’s history in the area because “he didn’t ask for it. In my opinion, he was not interested in the details.”

Bruscino described his investigation: He spent several hours investigating damage to buildings and backtracking the bear in the snow.

“It didn’t walk past a single house without going up on the porch, front steps, back steps or deck,” he said.

He interviewed a number of residents who seemed “pretty concerned about the bear’s behavior.” Once the bear was sedated in the office, he conducted a physical and measured its feet against the tracks he’d studied in his investigation.
“They matched perfectly,” he said.

Before a bear is euthanized, “We usually discuss it amongst several of us,” Bruscino said. “I’m the program supervisor and [my employees] have got to kind of talk to me about it before they make it a decision. In this case, I discussed it with my supervisor prior to making the decision.”

About seven hours after it was trapped, the bear was euthanized with a lethal injection under anesthesia, “which is a humane method based on guidelines from the humane society,” Bruscino said.

Bruscino said that a resident of the subdivision came by to thank the department the next day, as the individual was concerned for their family’s safety, and that there have been more additional calls from the subdivision since its removal. Bruscino reiterated that he was “very, very comfortable” with the decision.

At his home, Shockey asked Bruscino if the decision to euthanize a bear is guided by any kind of policy or procedure. Bruscino, Shockey said, told him “no.” Later, Shockey presented Game and Fish Officials with a 1999 document titled “Statewide protocol for managing aggressive wildlife/human interactions,” which was cited in the Black Bear Management Policy.

“This is exactly the decision-tree ordering Mark Bruscino said didn’t exist,” Shockey said. “He even elaborated on why [they] couldn’t have it.”

Bruscino, who helped draft the document, said it is a guiding document for when “someone is hurt or killed by a bear or lion or something [like that].” It’s not a guideline for “nuisance” issues or when there’s no human injury involved, he said, and is not directly applicable to the situation at Pacific Creek.

He elaborated that a “cookbook approach” to bear management “just wouldn’t work. The other states that have that end up with what’s more or less a ‘strike policy’ – like a two-strike or three-strike policy – they don’t have the latitude to consider all those variables, and I think that really limits the manager’s ability to say ‘this bear hasn’t really done all that much.’”

Bruscino said that imposing that kind of policy might increase the number of bear euthanizations in Wyoming as policies like these “generally err on the side of conservatism” and “are written for the worst-case scenario.”

Gocke said the same thing. “It’s hard to have a cookbook type of protocol. You look at all the factors in the situation. How many food rewards has the bear gotten? Is it still afraid of people? Has it caused property damage? You have to use professional judgment in the end in a lot of these cases.”

Gocke said “you’d be hard-pressed” to find someone with Bruscino’s judgment and experience. “The question you really have to ask yourself is: If we relocate this animal, what are its chances of living out its life as a wild bear? [Bruscino] has a pretty good feel for when a bear will be able to do that. I trust his judgment on something like this.”
Gocke believed that the principles in the 1999 document were applicable – to a point. “It guides our actions in a general sense,” he said, “to the point that a document can direct actions. But, again, every incident is different. Ultimately to some degree you’re going to have to employ the judgment of your professional people.”

Photo by Gary Shockey
The black bear made regular appearances at the Pacific Creek subdivision.