Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

We locate a moderately priced restaurant that is not one of the eighteen fined for having unsecured garbage and publicly shamed in this week’s Aspen Times. I dig out a list of questions, questions that basically boil down to: What is happening here, and is there an answer? I bring up something Kurtis Tesch said when we were driving back to town. He shared a theory about how the ballot measure that banned Colorado’s spring bear hunt (because it orphaned cubs) had caused the rise in the number of bear conflicts. Breck says he often hears this argument. “There’s a sentiment carried forward by a lot of hunting communities and parks and wildlife people that one way out of this is to hunt our way out of it. But there’s no good science to say that lowering the bear population will lower the number of conflicts.” For one thing, he says, there’s a mismatch between where the hunters go and where the conflicts are. “Hunting quotas are set according to game management units.” I don’t catch all the details because I’m distracted by some intense celebrity name-dropping at a large table next to ours. I hear: “This game unit has Aspen, Snowmass, Carbondale—” “… Reese Witherspoon—” “They’ll say, ‘Okay, within this unit, harvest × number—’ ” “So then Reese …” Hunting does alter the behavior of the hunted somewhat, Breck allows, in that it perpetuates fear and avoidance of humans. But Colorado still has a fall bear hunt, so he doesn’t buy less hunting as a reason for the rise in bear conflic...