Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

The bear appears to have gone straight to the refrigerator. It opened the door, pulled out and scarfed a tub of cottage cheese, broke a bottle of maple syrup and a jar of honey and lapped those up, and then moved on to a pint of Häagen-Dazs in the freezer. (Pitkin County bears consistently prefer premium brands. “They will not touch Western Family ice cream,” Tina White reports.)

French door handles, locked or unlocked, are so easy for black bears to open that they’re known as “bear handles” and are prohibited by local building code. But people like them, and do-it-yourselfers either don’t know or don’t care about the finer points of building code, and Kurtis sees them everywhere. Hollow doorknobs are likewise prohibited; bears crush and grip them in their teeth and easily turn them. (Some businesses make things even easier. Automatic doors open for bears, too.)

Kurtis thinks we may be looking at the work of two different bears. The first one entered and exited through the downstairs bedroom window, and a different bear came up to the French doors on the kitchen deck and smelled or saw the aftermath of the first pillage. His reasoning is based on the position of the doors as Carmen found them: opened inward. It would be unusual, he says, for a bear to pull a door inward in order to pass through. It’s also possible the same bear returned to the scene a second time. Kurtis says they often come back at least once.

Like human burglars, bears typically break in when the homeowners are away. Given the large percentage of Aspen properties that are let as vacation rentals part of the year, empty homes are easy for bears to find. With bolder bears, burglary may escalate to home invasion. Often the bear comes in while people are asleep, especially, Kurtis says, when it’s hot and someone has left the windows open. Or a sliding door is left unlocked. Sometimes the residents are not asleep. “We’ve had people eating dinner at their table and the bear walks in, grabs some food of...

Colorado Parks and Wildlife, like many state wildlife agencies, has a two-strike policy. If Kurtis gets a call about a bear nosing around someone’s trash or hanging out in a back yard, say, he will attempt to trap it, and if he succeeds, he’ll ear-tag it and take it into the woods and release it and hope it doesn’t come back. (A trap is left in place no more than three days, to lower the odds of trapping the wrong bear.) Often the trap stays empty. “We’re not catching them like we used to,” Kurtis confided later. “I don’t know if they’ve just gotten smarter, or what the deal is.” The bear that broke in here would not be granted a second strike. Because it’s breaking into locked windows, and will likely continue to do so—and, if it’s a sow, teach its cubs to do so—the agency considers it a threat to public safety. Kurtis says people often decline to report break-ins, because they know their call may set in motion a death sentence for the bear. The black bear is a ridiculously lovable species. There’s a reason kids have teddy bears, not teddy goats or teddy eels.

“When you do trap the right one and take it out,” Kurtis says, “you notice a slight decrease in break-ins in the area. For a short period of time. And eventually another bear comes in and takes over. So.” “It’s a temporary solution,” says Breck. “You’re just mowing the grass.” That wasn’t exactly what I was asking about. I was more asking about the “taking out.” I’m going to have to be more direct. “And it can’t be fun to have to put down a bear.” All these euphemisms.‡ Taking out. Putting down. Are we killing an animal or unloading a truck? “No, it’s not,” Kurtis says flatly. “Last week I had to put down a sow and a cub.” The pair were repeatedly breaking into houses. “And that is not fun. At all.” We drive along in a grim quiet broken intermittently by the walkie-talkie clearing its throat. “In that instance,” Kurtis adds, “I was struggling on how to do it exactly. I didn’t want to put the cub down and have the mom watch that. I didn’t want to put the mom down and have the baby see that. I ended up darting the baby so it went to sleep. I put the mom down, and then while the baby was asleep, I put it down. That way neither one had to see the other. So.” When Kurtis says “so” it is shorthand for the many frustrations the job holds. Uncaring homeowners who don’t bother to follow the laws. Who then blame and hound him when a bear crosses a line and is destroyed. Government agencies that would rather pass the buck than spend a buck.

So far, no one in the area has been killed during one of these break-ins. Black bears, by and large, are not aggressive animals. Still, I’m surprised that what sometimes happens when human burglars break into homes hasn’t happened here: homeowner or homeowner’s dog surprises burglar, homeowner and/or dog goes after burglar, burglar panics and kills homeowner. “Oh, it’s coming,” Kurtis says. Black bears may be no more aggressive than raccoons, but they’re a lot larger. What if we accepted that risk? What if we chose to live not only with the occasional bear in the kitchen but with the likelihood that someone at some point will be killed by one of those bears? Planes are allowed to operate even though every now and then they crash and people die. One difference is that with airlines, sales revenue covers the expense of lawsuits and insurance. When a bear harms or kills a person, the state wildlife agency may be held liable, and bears, unlike planes, aren’t generating the revenue it would take to cover the costs. There have been a couple of lawsuits recently, one in Utah and another in Arizona, with large payouts to the families of the victims. The agencies had been aware of the bear’s presence in the area but had opted to monitor the situation rather than set a trap. Breck rolls down his window. “So that’s going to be your limiting factor on that idea.”

“These right here?” Breck points over our heads, to one of the small trees that line the pedestrian walkway where we’ve been questing for an affordable lunch. “Crabapples. The city planted crabapple trees.” People enjoy the profusion of pink spring blossoms. That then turn into bite-sized apples that bears mouth straight off the branch, like cartoon emperors with their clusters of grapes. Black bears show up midday in downtown Aspen regularly enough that the city passed a law making it a ticketable offense to ignore the CPW officer standing guard and go right up to a bear and snap a selfie. Kurtis Tesch’s predecessor tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the city council to replace the crabapple trees. When I got home I stumbled onto an online Aspen Arbor Guide to residential tree selection and planting. Among the recommended species: crabapple, oak, chokecherry, and serviceberry trees.

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...

On the drive over, I had asked about Aspen celebrities. I got: “Jack … Nicholson. Nicklaus? Which one is the golfer?” He knew that Kevin Costner has a place, because Kevin Costner once had a bear problem.

Wild animals were either a commodity or they were varmints. Bounties were widespread. Bears were routinely poisoned, up through the 1970s.

Breck’s employer, the National Wildlife Research Center, has had many incarnations and names over the past hundred and fifty years but always one goal: effective, cost-efficient wildlife damage control. Whether the wild animals were predators taking livestock or birds and rodents helping themselves to crops; whether the name on the door was Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy or Eradication Methods Laboratory or Division of Predatory Animal and Rodent Control, the goal was to help the rancher and farmer. What looked like pure wildlife biology—studies of animal behavior, food habits, migratory patterns–was biology in service of prosperity. With the birth of environmental and animal welfare movements in the 1960s and ’70s, a national conscience began to emerge. Activists pushed back against practices like den-shooting and airdrops of strychnine-laced bait. In 1971, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Humane Society of the United States sued to end the use of poisons in predator control. The following year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) canceled registrations for strychnine and two other predacides. Advocacy groups sparked a shift in public sentiment, which over time has become impossible—and impolitic—to ignore. A growing percentage of Americans feel a strong emotional connection to wild animals and disapprove of their destruction for economic reasons. In 1978, three thousand Americans were asked to rate their like or dislike of twenty-six ...

“This is new territory for wildlife biologists,” Breck says, forking salad greens. “And we’re not very good at it. When I was an undergrad it was all about, How do we bring these populations back? How do we count them, manage them? Now it’s all about human-wildlife interactions. How do we manage this? We’re seeing wildlife biologists going …” Breck mimes banging his head against the table. “The game has changed.” At the moment, it feels unwinnable, this game. There are more bears, more wolves and coyotes, and ever more humans moving into their ranges. And no cultural consensus on what should be done when one of those animals ransacks a kitchen or kills some sheep or nips a steakhouse owner’s backside. We have human-wildlife conflict and human-human conflict. We have ranchers and farmers and animal lovers hating on each other in a cultural clash that can feel as dug-in as the politics in this country. Kill them all! Don’t harm a single one! Breck and other specialists in human-wildlife conflict are starting to move their focus from animal biology and behavior over to human behavior. As a science, it’s called human dimensions. The goal, stated unscientifically, is to find pathways to compromise and resolution. It often begins by bringing together people who aren’t normally in the same room and getting them to listen to and even empathize with one another. Breck recently co-founded the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence. In early 2020, the center organized a two-day gathe...

Lately Breck has been spending time with Zach Strong, director of Carnivore Conservation at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The NRDC’s more standard approach to Wildlife Services has been to sue them. Breck encouraged Strong to forge a relationship with the Wildlife Services director in Montana. Partly as a result of this unlikely pairing, three nonlethal—or “wildlife conflict-prevention”—specialist positions were created within Wildlife Services, two in Montana and one in Oregon. By showcasing the effectiveness of these hires, NRDC and Defenders of Wildlife were able to secure federal funds for hiring and evaluating similar positions in ten other states. Breck is hopeful that the new developments at Wildlife Services signal a shift within the culture there. Meanwhile, the Fish and Game Department in Idaho still funds a hunter-and rancher-friendly nonprofit that offers bounties on wolves.

Bear biologist Dave Garshelis has been spending time on the Tibetan plateau, where brown bears routinely break into the homes of herders who have left for the summer to graze their stock. “They’d come back and the house would be a wreck, completely demolished. But these people are strict Buddhists and they don’t want any retribution.” Garshelis told me about a conversation he had with the local officer who responds in cases of animal attacks. “I asked him, ‘What if you were called to a situation where you saw a bear on top of a person, mauling a person? Would you shoot the bear?’ And he said, ‘I don’t have the right to decide whose life is more important, the person or the bear.’ ” In India, around five hundred people are killed every year in encounters with wild elephants. Government policy is to compensate the families but not, with few exceptions, to destroy the elephant. The state with the highest numbers—403 deaths in the past five years—is West Bengal.

When you live off your own fat, do you need to use the toilet? If you are a bear, you do not. Hibernating bears reabsorb their urine and form a “fecal plug.” Cubs, on the other hand, let it go inside the den. Not a problem, because the mother bear eats it—partly as cleanup, but mostly as food. She is nursing, after all. While hibernating. Black bear hibernation isn’t the same as sleep. They’re just sort of slowed down and out of it. Surreally, black bear sows give birth halfway through their hibernation. They deliver a couple of cubs, snack on the placenta, then go back into hibernation, nursing and tending their cubs in a state of semi-alertness until spring. According to a scientist who has taken blood samples from hibernating black bears, they do not have sleep breath and their dens don’t stink. They smell like roots and earth and that is all.

Taser International briefly sold a wildlife taser, the X3W, that some thought held promise as a hazing tool. The devices were purchased mainly to be used as they are on humans, to gain control in a threatening situation without necessitating the firing of a lethal weapon. The item sold poorly, a company representative told me, because it was costly and because it only worked on very tall mammals—a moose, or a bear on its hind legs—and at a distance of less than 25 feet. (Otherwise one of its two probes, the downwardly aimed one, would hit the ground.) The impetus for the X3W was an agitated moose whose calves were stuck in an open house foundation. The moose had chased Larry Lewis, of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and a state trooper three times around the patrol car, when the trooper pulled out his Taser. The moose was stunned, recovered, and ran off, allowing Lewis to safely extract the calves. Impressed, he contacted the Taser people and worked with them to design a wildlife version that was safety-tested at the Kenai Moose Research Center (“a world leader in moose science”). Tasing was found to be less stressful to the animal than tranquilization, and safer in that there’s no risk of killing it by overdose. (Darts are filled according to an estimate of the animal’s weight.) So it seemed like a promising alternative when a situation develops quickly and lives are at stake, or when a moose has “a chicken feeder stuck on its head”—the example Lewis provided for ...

I understand the desire on the part of those whose job sometimes requires them to kill an animal to avoid that verb. Kill has a taint of murder. The sheer number of euphemisms suggests a long-running struggle to find something right. I collected them for a while: cull, take, dispatch, remove, lethally remove. As a word person, I balk at euthanize, which implies the relief of suffering, and harvest, which makes animals sound like corn. I heard one person say “use lethal force on,” which seems better suited to SWAT operations and Gary Busey movies.

We’re starting in North Bengal—confusingly, a region of West Bengal—where each year, wild elephants kill, on average, 47 people and injure another 164. Forty-seven people per year, in an area the size of Connecticut. India’s forest department has wildlife rangers that get involved in these cases, but they don’t kill the elephant.

Elephants! Naha assures me they’re not far off. It’s winter, the time of year when herds are on the move. They forage at night and sleep by day in patches of teak and lal—remnants of the forests that once stretched from the Indian state of Assam through North Bengal all the way to the eastern border of Nepal. This “elephant corridor” has since been fractured and diminished, first by the many sprawling tea estates planted by the British and more recently by military bases and settlements of refugees and immigrants from Nepal and Bangladesh. Ever more humans are coming into these forests to cut wood and graze their livestock, turning elephant habitat into human. In their attempts to cross the land, the elephants encounter barriers, dangers, dead ends. The corridor is now a pinball game. Herds can become isolated in a single pocket of forest. They become “pocketed elephants.” Keeping elephants in a pocket is as ill-advised as it sounds. The gene pool stagnates and the population density spikes. Soon there’s not enough food to support them. They wander into villages to eat what they can find, and what they find is people’s crops and granaries.

Aritra points out his window as we pass a turnoff. “Two kilometers up that road a man was killed by an elephant. A few days ago. Three people were working on the roadway. They ran when they saw the elephant, and one man was separated, and the elephant followed him.”

Saroj Raj is the range officer for the Bamanpokhri Beat of the local forest division, where every year since 2016, someone has been killed by an elephant.

Officer Raj gives me the particulars of the most recent fatalities. He begins, each time, with the exact date. You get the feeling there’s a lot of paperwork. “Thirty-one October, 2018. Three workers in the road.” The spot we passed earlier. “Suddenly one elephant appeared.” One can be scarier than many. Herds comprise females and young elephants, the peace-loving jumbos of my childhood. A loner is typically male, and males can be trouble. Bull elephants go through a periodic hormonal tumult called musth, during which their testosterone levels are as much as ten times higher than at other times. This gives them a competitive edge with other males and with the herd’s dominant matriarch, but also a degree of random volatility. The musth mood state ranges, in the words of Asian elephant specialist Jayantha Jayewardene, from “hyper-irritability” to “a charging or destructive tendency” toward other elephants, human beings, “and even inanimate objects.” Villagers know this. “The men tried to escape into the bushes,” says Officer Raj. “One person unfortunately fell down.” Officer Raj supplies the detail Aritra was careful to omit. The elephant stepped on the man’s head. When you weigh 6,000 pounds, simply stepping or kneeling on a person—or, in the 1992 case of a riled circus elephant named Janet, performing a headstand upon the person—is an effective means of killing. But Officer Raj’s determination in this case, based on footprints and disturbances of the surrounding vegetation...

“These elephants were not in the intention to kill,” Officer Raj says. How does he know? Because the bodies were in one piece. “If an elephant is in an angry mode, the body will not be intact. It will get in pieces.” A book by Jayantha Jayewardene includes a list of the nine recorded methods by which an angry or musth-addled elephant has killed a human being. “Placing a fore foot on one limb of the victim and ripping off the other with the trunk” is number 3. (Elephants use a similar anchor-and-pull technique to strip an uprooted shrub of limbs and leaves to eat.) Rulers of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 1600s were said to have taken advantage of this natural behavior, training elephants to serve as executioners. An engraving from An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon depicts an elephant so engaged. One forefoot rests on the malefactor’s torso, and the trunk is wrapped around the man’s raised left leg. Were it not for the caption (“An Execution by an Eliphant”) and the raggedly torn-off arm in the foreground, you could get the impression that Ceylonese monarchs trained elephants to serve as bodyworkers.

Shooting an elephant is not only illegal but, depending on the caliber of weapon, pointless. Our Janet withstood fifty-five shots from Palm Bay, Florida, police officers’ 9mm duty revolvers as well as the first round fired by an off-duty SWAT officer with a stash of ammo designed to penetrate armored personnel carriers. (The second round stilled her.)

The squad knows that elephants are social animals, so they stay calmer if they’re herded off the premises in a group. The rangers converge on them from the sides, like cowhands, and move the whole group in the direction of the forest out of which they’ve come. By now, the animals recognize the sound of the elephant squad vehicles. “We drive into the area, and they go.” Officer Raj smiles slightly. He’s not a smiley guy. “This is a convenience for us.”

A beat officer sitting with us has been charged four times. “They tell you not to run,” he says. “And I tell you, this is very hard to do when an elephant is coming straight at you!” My request for a ride-along is turned down, as is a second request.

Deaths, when they happen, tend to occur in the half hour or more it takes for the squad to arrive. Upon discovering elephants raiding their crops, villagers rush out of their homes, yelling, throwing stones, lighting torches and firecrackers.† A village may have freelance “elephant chasers” wielding spikes and carrying out other non–Best Practices. Bulls and dominant matriarchs may charge in defense, and normally placid females and calves may panic and stampede. In the dark of unlit fields and paddies, people stumble and fall and elephants are running blind and, as my mother liked to say, somebody’s going to get hurt.

“The elephant we can guide easily,” says Officer Raj. “To guide the people is the hard part. They are not in the condition to listen.” They’re upset, and that is understandable. Village farmers work hard and have little to show for it. A single Asian elephant may consume three hundred pounds of vegetation in a day. Between the raiding and the trampling, a small herd can quickly torpedo a season’s labor and livelihood. An elephant among the crops is a powerful impetus to unwise action. Throw in the wobbly judgment and dimmed impulse control of inebriation, and the results can be dire, Naha says. He squats in front of a speaker, untangling a spaghetti heap of wires. “This is what we see. A group of people are drunk. Someone wants to be the hero, so he goes in front of the animal, harasses it, and that animal in self-defense …” Naha, too, avoids the verb kill, with its undertone of intent. “There is an accident.” By his own data, 36 percent of the people killed by elephants in North Bengal between 2006 and 2016 were drunk. Later, I would see this head-line in the Hindustan Times: “Drunken Man Challenges Elephants’ Herd, Trampled to Death in Jharkhand.” (Jharkhand borders West Bengal.) “He tried to fight with them,” a forest ranger told the reporter. “Them” was eighteen elephants.

In North Bengal, elephants drink what the villagers drink: haaria, a home brew fermented and stored in quantities sufficient to inebriate an elephant. (Because elephants lack the main enzyme that breaks down ethanol, it takes less than you’d think.) According to Officer Raj, two things happen when elephants liquor up. Most just stumble away from the herd and sleep it off. But every herd seems to have an aggressive drunk—the matriar...

In 1984, as part of a study at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, three Asian elephants “with no known history of alcohol use” and seven African elephants from Lion Country Safari were served a “large calibrated drum” of grain alcohol-laced water. The animals tended to wander off, away from the herd. They stood or leaned with their eyes closed or “wrapped their trunks about themselves.” They skipped meals. They didn’t bother to bathe. The matriarch became louder and more aggressive, as did a bull named Congo.

To discourage elephants from tippling, villagers may drag the hooch indoors. A terrible idea. Because now it is not drunk elephants they need to worry about, but elephants determined to become drunk—that is to say, elephants who smell booze inside the house and see no reason not to knock down a wall to get to it. In Naha’s survey, 8 percent of North Bengalis killed by elephants were sleeping inside their homes when it happened.

I’ve heard him say “I was once chased by a tiger” in the same workaday tone in which you or I might say “I was once in Omaha.”

The more people understand about the biology of elephants and the behavior of herds, the safer the encounters. It mostly boils down to staying calm and giving the animals space. Especially mothers with calves, and even more especially, lone males, and extra-strength especially, males in musth. (Some hallmarks of musth, courtesy of Jayantha Jayewardene: profuse oozing from glands on the temples, frequent erections, and “fully opened ogling eyes with roving eyeballs.”)

Herding elephants into the nearest forest patch provides immediate benefits for the local villagers, but in the long run, Naha told me later, it aggravates the problem. Because it aggravates the elephants. They begin to associate humans with the anxiety and privation of being chased off when they’re trying to eat. They start to stand their ground. There are reports coming out of conflict regions in the neighboring state of Assam that say female elephants are starting to become as aggressive as bulls.

A better system, Naha believes, would incorporate sensors to detect the approach of a herd. A warning would go out to village heads and trained local response teams who would monitor the situation and try to intervene before crops are trampled and chaos erupts. Naha doesn’t mean motion sensors or heat sensors, both of which would be triggered by other mammals. He means seismic sensors: sensors triggered by vibrations so powerful only the footfall of an elephant (or a small earthquake) would have created them.

He hands off the mic to the manager beside him, who outlines the estate’s present elephant deterrence strategy: a team that patrols on a tractor, lighting firecrackers as needed. The microphone continues its travels. The next manager is another numbers guy. In the twelve years he has worked here, seven or eight people have been killed by elephants.

One tea collector immediately rises from her chair. She is older than many, maybe fifty, and is dressed, like all the women, in the colorful, patterned sari she wears to work the tea plots. Aritra jumps up to bring her the mic, but she doesn’t need it. Her anger is an amplifier. The mustache showroom shifts in its seats. Aritra resumes translating. “You tell us to change crops,” the woman says, referring to the small gardens kept by the workers. “From corn or rice to something like ginger or chilis, which elephants don’t like. But we grow corn and rice to feed ourselves. Also, once the tractor passes, the elephant is coming, coming, coming again. Elephants need a lot of food.” The woman sits down again. “We need different measures.”

Measures that seem intuitively obvious are, in practical fact, limited—by their expense and by the new problems they create. Electric fencing is a for-instance. You need enough of it to keep the herds out, but not so much that it blocks their migrations. Maintaining and repairing long stretches of fencing is time-consuming and costly and often doesn’t get done. Or is done wrong. The voltage has to be high enough to discourage an elephant but not so high as to electrocute it. On average, fifty elephants a year are electrocuted in India. And there is the considerable challenge of elephant intelligence. An Indian elephant, confronted with an electric fence, will likely soon figure out how to get past it without getting shocked. It will figure out that wood doesn’t conduct electricity. It will push down the posts or it will pick up a log and use it to press down the wires to let others step through.

Elephants have been put to work—by the Indian military, historically, and more recently by the timber industry. They’re treated like employees, in that the forest department keeps a log of their hours on a work register. These “duty elephants” are of course not paid a salary but, Naha told me, at age fifty they receive a “pension,” in the form of retirement lodgings at a pilkhana with meals and a daily bath followed by a rubdown with oil.

Elephants are vegetarians, but they are not picky eaters. They’ll eat most parts of a plant—grains, grass and leaves, stems, twigs, bark. On a tea estate in the Sonitpur district of Assam in 2017, three wild elephants broke into a workers’ shop at 2:00 a.m. and helped themselves to the cotton fiber product known as rupees. They broke open the cash box and consumed 26,000 rupees in large denominations. One thing Indian elephants won’t eat is tea leaves. Everyone here likes to drink tea, but few, human or beast, like to eat it. The leaves are too bitter. Small crop losses result when elephants trample plants as they pass through an estate, but, by and large, it is the workers, not the owners and managers, who suffer.