Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

With a growing percentage of Fat Alberts, will coexistence eventually become a possibility? Or even a policy? Could we live with bears in the backyard the way we live with raccoons and skunks? I posed this question to Mario Klip, a bear specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) in the Lake Tahoe region. Many people in his area already do, he said. Say a couple of homeowners find a bear under the deck. Rather than call Fish and Wildlife, they may call the Bear League, a local advocacy group. “They’ll send someone out to crawl under and poke it with a stick and get it to run off, and then help board up the space for you.” Klip practices coexistence with the BEAR League. “They are,” he points out, “filling a vacuum.” More and more people want nonlethal options for bears that trespass or break into houses. And not just Californians. Dave Garshelis works in rural northern Minnesota, where most people have guns and are allowed—encouraged, even—to solve their bear problems themselves. “I’ve been here thirty-six years,” Garshelis told me. “I can sense a sea change in attitudes to bears.” What would happen if wildlife managers did nothing, if they stopped destroying the recidivist bears? The fear is this: Those bears’ cubs will learn to break into homes, and ditto those cubs’ cubs. As break-ins escalate, tolerance erodes. As Garshelis put it, “It’s hard to be tolerant when there’s a bear in your kitchen.”