The Bear Comes to the Market

The other bear; the other market. This past week, a bear dropped in on the dumpsters at the back of the supermarket at the mall in Gibsons. It was evening, but not late enough in the evening that everything was closed. There were cars in the parking lot, people in the mall and the parking lots, and now a bear had joined the mix. The bear was just after the food potential in the dumpster, but somebody called the police; the police notified the bear conservation officers. Somehow, that notification got lost and it was the police (in this case, the RCMP) and the bear and the parking lot and the public that wrote the story.

The police were obviously concerned about what the bear might do. At least some of the people in the lot were concerned about what the RCMP might do. And eventually, the police did it. I would have thought that they would have tranquilized the bear and carted him off to sleep it off up in the mountains, but apparently when a bear is hit with a tranquilizer dart, he doesn’t obligingly fall down to the ground in a comatose state. Instead, he runs around with a strong sense of irritation and of having been violated. Not a good idea when there are a lot of people around.

Lots of concern after the fact. The bear conservation people say they wouldn’t have done anything differently; the police say they couldn’t just leave and hope for the best; the unhappy observers felt there must have been some other way to handle this than the way it was handled. The police suggest that it’s the mall businesses’ fault for leaving food in the dumpsters, just as they regularly tell the public that they are at fault for leaving food outside their houses, whether in compost bins, garbage cans, or on trees. I have a vague sense that lots of people think it’s the bears’ fault for not staying up on the mountains. Whoever is at fault, the bears have paid this year for their deeds. According to the local newspaper, 10 of them have been killed for bad behaviors in the face of over 600 calls from the public concerned about bear appearances.

The fact is, we can’t live with them and they don’t see any need to move somewhere else. Or maybe that’s, they can’t live with us and we don’t see any need to move elsewhere. In either case, we always have easy food and much of the time they don’t. And then they want our easy food. And we don’t mind all that much sharing it with them, but we want them to be grateful. And they aren’t.

I’ve never called the police about our bear but our bear has never shown particularly alarming tendencies, although he is not afraid of us, which is not a good thing. I get the fruit off the trees before it ripens, but we have an acre of wild blackberries that both bear and we eat, and there’s no way in the world that I’m going to be able to get rid of all those blackberry bushes, even if I wanted to. He rarely messes with the compost bin, but it does occasionally happen and that is a black mark against me for having failed to get it mixed up enough with leaves and previously composted vegetation. Mostly, I freeze such material and deliver it to the garbage can about 15 minutes before the garbage truck arrives.

That’s not a viable solution for everybody. You've got to have enough freezer space; you've got to be around 15 minutes before the garbage truck comes. The individual public can do more to discourage bears, certainly, but the common public (what we call the local government, I mean) is going to have to make it more possible for individuals to act responsibly. Otherwise, we’ll just be killing the bears one by one until they are all gone. We did it to the buffalo, we did it to the passenger pigeon; we can surely manage to do it to this small population of black bears on the Sunshine Coast. And then we'll be sorry. And then, after awhile, we will have forgotten that there used to be bears here. That's how we tell the story.