The Decibel - What we get wrong about bears

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Western preconceived notions about bears being deadly have led to dire consequences for bears. But the relationship and safety around bears is different with Indigenous communities and wildlife conservation groups, which have long learned how to coexist with the big mammals.We are joined by Joy SpearChief-Morris, a staff reporter with The Globe and Mail. She’s going to break down bear misconceptions and tell us how to respect bears when you encounter them.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Here's what would happen if you were attacked by a bear. Your defense strategy would depend on what kind of bear you were facing. So you're out in the woods, you turn around and see this. What do you do? Would you run for your life, play dead, or attack it before it attacks you? I did see a grizzly bear. The way it looked at me was so much different than anything that I've ever seen in the wild. Like, black bears, they look at you like this, like, what are you? Are you going to eat me? Are you food? Or am I going to eat you? Are you going to eat me? They're a little nervous. Grizzly bears don't look at you like that. They

look at you like this, like right at you. Am I going to eat you? When we think of bears, we often think of dangerous and aggressive animals. But we don't often stop to think about where those ideas come from and how accurate they really are. Joy Spearchief-Morris is a staff reporter with The Globe and Mail. She just wrote a piece in The Narwhal about grizzly bears in Alberta. Today, Joy's here to tell us

about the common misconceptions around bears and how indigenous communities have learned to see different sides of these animals. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Joy, it's great to have you here. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for having me. So you spent a lot of time researching bears. Why bears? Funny enough, grizzly bears are my favorite animal or bears in general.

So I've always just had like a really big love for them. I've never been afraid of bears, which I know might be a weird thing to say for most people, but I have never been afraid of bears. I respect them and I obviously know that they are, you know, not pets, but they have never been afraid of bears. I respect them. And I obviously know that they are, you know, not pets, but they don't scare me. But I was always really amazed when I'd have friends who would talk about not wanting to go hiking because they were scared they were going to run into a bear. So I started to think about why I thought the way I did and if it had things to do with my experiences and how I grew up and if that also impacted the way I saw bears. And

what if you change the way people thought about bears, would that change the way we manage them? What are some of the misconceptions towards bears that you've come across? Yeah, so the most common ones we think of are the ones that we see most often in media, but also television and movies and the way that bears are depicted in kind of a cinematic way. So, you know, if you think about like The Reverent, the most famous scene is the grizzly bear attacks Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah, so these ideas of bears is like aggressive, essentially. Exactly. This idea that bears are aggressive, they're man-eaters, they're territorial. And those are some of the predominant stereotypes.

You know, a lot of the news that makes it about grizzly bears or grizzly bear encounters with people, the ones that we see in the news are always grizzly bear attacked hikers or bear attacked dogs on hike and things like that. And do we have any idea of where these misconceptions come from? So from what I've learned, they go back to the arrival of European settlers in North America, or Turtle Island, as it's called by many indigenous people. So settlers came and one of the biologists I spoke to would talk about, you know, Lewis and Clark, those expeditions across America and into the Rockies, and they would see these bears and they had muskets with them and they

would just, you know, start shooting at the bears they saw because they were afraid or, you know, all of the bears that they would shoot at then started to learn that, you know, people are aggressive and then bears would start to attack. And so it just continued to perpetuate this idea that bears were dangerous and therefore we need guns to protect ourselves in the wild with bears. I've learned dogs really scare bears. So you always should have like your dogs on a leash if you're hiking. You know, we've kind of created this story over time that bears are dangerous. And as we hunted bears, bears got to associate people as dangerous.

I think, yeah, let's kind of dig here a little bit more because I think we almost just assume now that we kind of need guns to defend ourselves. And there are certain circumstances, of course, like if you're in the high north, especially like you want that kind of protection just in case, right? But it ends up being kind of the default that a bear wanders into a community or like, you know, goes towards garbage. They end up being shot, even though we see them in a park, sometimes they end up being shot. Like, why is that usually the response? I think it has to do a lot with the fact that people assume that the worst will happen. You know, we hear these stories of maulings and we hear these stories of these really bad outcomes happening with wildlife. And I mean, like a

full-grown grizzly bear is huge. It's a very scary sight to come across. And so, you know, you want to be able to have that way of protecting yourself in the form of a musket. I think also it has a lot to do with the way that management policies work and the way that traditionally things have been done when it comes to bears and grizzly bears and large carnivores. Is that, you know, like if a bear gets into trouble, we can't have it around people. It's going to be a danger. So we might as well just like get rid of it. So those sort of things still exist when we think about mitigation techniques and how we manage wildlife. And the problem is, though, that those techniques have existed for so long,

and we've hunched grizzly bears so much that we have now actually become more dangerous to bears than bears are to us. Wow. There are far more grizzly bears and far more bears, black bears, all types of bears that are killed by human related causes or mortalities than bears kill humans in a given year. So if we don't default to shooting them, I guess, how else could we deter bears in those settings? Jurisdictionally, the way that you deal with bears is actually broken up between provincial parks, national parks, and communities. So in Alberta, which is where I looked at the story, the way that Parks Canada deals with grizzly bears, and bears in general, they don't distinguish in terms of their, how they deal with a grizzly bear and how they deal with a black bear,

which is another thing I think people think that grizzly bears are more territorial or going to be more dangerous than black bears, and that's not true at all. One is no more dangerous than the other. They said they may take more precautions with how they deal with grizzly bears, just based on their size and based on, they can be a little bit more unpredictable, but the techniques don't change.

Interesting, okay. Yeah, so the way that Parks Canada deals with bears, they have a set of tiers and steps that they follow in terms of like, noise if a bear comes in to try and get it away from a crowded area to they might move into, you know, throwing shotguns and things that they would use to try and get the bear to kind of get scared away. And then they continuously progress into being like rubber bullets, and then actually having to like transfer the bear out of town themselves. Okay, so this is a lot of how we respond to bears. I guess I wonder about how

these responses actually affect the bears and specifically their population over time. Like, do we have a sense of how what we do affects the number of bears that are around? Yeah, so until 2006, it was completely legal to shoot bears for sport, grizzly bears in particular in Alberta. It should also be noted that it is still to this day legal to shoot black bears. For sport, you can still do that. You can still hunt black bears. But we reached a point where grizzly bears had been hunted so much, had been driven into force so much,

their numbers had depleted to an amount that we had less than 700 grizzly bears in the entire province. And so these are Alberta numbers? These are Alberta numbers, yes, specifically. And then in 2010, grizzly bears were named as a species at risk in Alberta, And so these are Alberta numbers? between 856 and 973 grizzly bears now in Alberta. So is this a number that I guess has been decreasing over time? Like bear populations used to be higher than they are now? Yeah. So the traditional territory of grizzly bears is they actually used to stretch all the way across the prairies all the way to Manitoba.

I think I saw too that one of the people you're talking to is talking about how important bears are as a species just like within the ecosystem. Could you tell me a little bit about that? Like, yeah, how important are bears? There is this debate going on amongst conservationists and biologists as to whether grizzly bears could be called a keystone species or an umbrella species. And the difference is pretty small because you're looking at a large carnivore and how it impacts the ecosystem as a whole. But the difference is that a keystone species is when you think about adding wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the United States and how the addition of those wolves changed the entire ecosystem dramatically. That doesn't happen with a grizzly bear.

A grizzly bear is considered more as an umbrella species. And with that, it means that by protecting grizzly bears as a large megafauna, we're actually going to protect all of the different species that fall under it. So it is beneficial to the environment. We'll be back in a moment. So we talked a little bit about, you know, people having a bit of a fear of bears, also an excitement of bears, too, if you want to see one from far away when you're in the wilderness. But is it common for a person to actually get attacked by a bear? So I can never say that that's never going to happen.

You know, bears are wild animals. They're unpredictable. The thing is that when you're out in the woods, you want to make sure that you are doing everything you can to be bear safe. Like I carry bear spray with me when I go hiking. I am also trying to be loud. I'm, you know, talking, I'm singing. I'm trying to make sure that I don't run into any wildlife that doesn't expect me to be there. So, you know, there are situations where people have been attacked by wildlife

and those things do happen. We can't diminish those, but those instances are the minority. So you mentioned about bear spray being an important thing, and that's something that we hear about a lot. What kind of precautions? Let's just walk through. If someone is hiking and camping, obviously you want to be bear safe. So what are the precautions that you really should be thinking about? What you want to make sure is, yeah, that you have bear spray. You're also in a group, preferably. So that also helps you with staying loud. You don't want to surprise wildlife. So you're going to be talking like when I go hiking with my parents, my dad's always

calling out to the bears. He goes, hey, bear. He calls out to them just to make sure the bears know he's there. So, yeah, I mean, it sounds silly, but it is alerting them that you're in the area and more likely they will try to avoid you. But it is being loud. It's also doing things to make sure that you're not attracting bears or wildlife. So if you have snacks, make sure that they're packed tightly in your bags, that you don't have any wrappers loose. Don't leave food around if you stop for a snack or if you're especially if you're camping, make sure your food is very far out of the way of your exact campsite, but also from any of your packs or your tents or any of your areas.

So just making sure you're not doing anything that could potentially attract, you know, a hungry bear looking for a snack. So from all of the interactions and all of the experts I spoke to, and this includes indigenous experts, this includes parks officials, biologists, conservationists, the real kind of moral behind the story is that you want to be respectful of bears. Like the more respectful bears you can be, the more positive your interactions with them are going to be. Okay. Well, let's talk about this then, because we started off really looking at how Western society has been seeing bears as dangerous. But I know you've also looked at how indigenous

communities view bears. So tell me about that and how it's different. Yeah, so I am a member of the Gaina Blood Tribe. So that is part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. So I'm a Blackfoot woman. I'm also an African American woman. So I grew up with knowing a lot of the traditions that surround my people. And, you know, always learning different stories. I think with indigenous people in Canada, we always have to remember that Indigenous people are individual nations. We're not monolithic, but we have similarities in the stories that we share. And I'd always had heard the stories of bears amongst different Indigenous nations in my nation as these stories of a lot of respect. And that would be regardless of whether or not particular nations hunted bears or did not, there's always this idea of the power of bears, the spiritual significance of bears,

and the amount of respect that was had for bears. So I started to look into these a bit deeper, and with the area that I looked at in Alberta, it is the traditional territory of the Blackfoot people, along with the Tsitsina people, the Stony Nakoda, and also some Métis settlements from Alberta. So I managed to speak with an elder from the Gayna Blood tribe, and he told me the Blackfoot story of the grizzly bear. And it's this beautiful story of the bear, how he came to man. He taught man how to live, taught man how to heal.

And in return, he said that you would not kill him, that you would respect him, and you wouldn't even use his real name. So there are still societies in the Blackfoot culture that don't, the ones who are part of those particular medicine pipe bundles that are related to the grizzly bear, they cannot say the name grizzly bear. So they use a pseudonym.

So the Blackfoot word for grizzly bear that is used is baksikwai, which means greasy mouth or kind of referring to the foam and round mouth like when it drools. And that is what's used instead. So there are a couple of those in Blackfoot culture where different names are used instead of the actual name of the animal. Black bears actually do use the name for black bears.

So Giaio, it means bear. That's used more prefer to black bears. But grizzly bears in particular have their own name and their own story. What I am hearing out of a lot of this, too, is this kind of respect that you were talking about, right? It's a respect for the animal. And so it's a different kind of relationship. Exactly. Yeah. It's very much a relationship that's based on respect. And the elder who spoke to me, his name's Mike Brewstead, he always talked about how, you know, blackfoot people don't get attacked by bears in his words. And what he would say is because, you know, Blackfoot people don't get attacked by bears in his words. And what he would say is because, you know, there is that understanding and that respect

between the two groups of people. How did you see this translate kind of in, I guess, day to day nowadays of how certain communities interact with bears then? I mean, the one thing that has to be noted is that Indigenous peoples' relationships with nature in many cases changed over time because of colonization. So the way that we think about wildlife has been influenced by settler colonialism. And that has impacted a lot of people who don't follow traditional ways and in terms of the way they think about wildlife and the way they think about bears. So when settlers came and pushed our people into reservations and the policies that resulted in starvation, our people began to hunt bears for

food for their need to survive. And so that came about as a means of colonization, but that's not the traditional relationship with bears. So it is important to note that those relationships have changed. But if you go back to the original relationships and the spiritual relationships, those ones are based on respect. Interesting. Well, I want to ask you about Waterton National Park. This is in southern Alberta. And it seems like there's some interesting initiatives that are happening here. So can you tell me, Joy, about what you learned about Waterton and I guess Parks Canada and what they're doing about bear and wildlife conservation? In Waterton Lakes National Park, they have their Wildlife Guardians Program. And Wildlife Guardians Programs exist in different national parks across Canada. And the role of Wildlife Guardians is that they are the

first kind of point of interaction between visitors to the park and Parks Canada itself. So they're the people who are out there talking with people. They're, you know, providing ways to be safe in the national park, kind of safety features, all those things we talked about in terms of, you know, carrying your brayer spray and putting away your garbage and, you know, being loud on trails and, you know, having plans and going in groups, all those things. Waterton has done something very unique in that in 2022, they were the first park in Canada to make an entirely indigenous-led and indigenous wildlife guardians team. So all the members of that team were indigenous, and most of them were local to the area.

And so what happens is there's this added idea or this added piece of education that came to those interactions in that now these visitors are interacting with people who come from indigenous worldviews and indigenous perspectives and are able to share those sort of viewpoints with visitors about what it means to be interacting with wildlife and also what it means to be interacting with Waterton itself, because it is a very sacred place to the Bukwut people. Yeah. So, I mean, it looks like there's a lot of work happening in that direction, but

it sounds like there's a lot of work to undo, right, because of our, you know, years of stereotypes and just general misconceptions about how we interact with wildlife and about bears in particular. So, I mean, I guess from the people you've talked to and the research you've done, Joy, like how do we go about doing that? Changing those misconceptions so that we learn to better coexist with bears. I think really it starts with this idea of education. And, you know, it's just making sure that people understand when they go into the wilderness and when they go out hiking and out in the wild that they are entering the territory of wild animals and they should be respected as wild animals. But also understanding that not every interaction you're going to have with wildlife will be a negative interaction. And making sure that you understand what you need to do to keep yourself safe, what you need to do to keep the animals around you safe as well, because,

you know, humans are a danger to bears. And so it is important that we are, you know, showing respect for these animals because we want bears on the landscape and we want them around. And we also want to be able to enjoy the outdoors in a way that we're safe as well. Joy, this has been so interesting. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wells. Our summer producer is Nagin Nia. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.