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All Attacks Articles
The death of Brian Matayoshi in a grizzly bear charge last summer was a classic conundrum for the people who work toward the day bears and humans can share the northern Rocky Mountains. "We are providing education, but it's not being received," Chris Servheen told the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee at its winter meeting in Missoula on Wednesday. As coordinator for grizzly recovery with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Servheen keeps track of bear incidents throughout the Rocky Mountains. And this year's run-ins appear to show we have successful strategies to avoid conflict, but we're not using them.
An adult female grizzly bear was shot and killed on Saturday after charging a pair of Kalispell elk hunters and injuring one of them near the Continental Divide about four miles south of Marias Pass on U.S. Highway 2.
Anthony Willits, 31, and Gregory Louden, 29, had earlier in the day shot a bull elk, taken out a portion of the meat, and were returning to the carcass when they encountered the sow and two cubs.
The men reported that as the sow grizzly charged them they shot it once before it bit Willits in the lower left leg below the knee. Louden shot the bear three more times, killing it.
In July, a grizzly defending her cubs attacked a couple hiking in Yellowstone National Park, it killing the man.
Again in Yellowstone, a man hiking alone was fatally mauled by a grizzly bear in August. In September, a Montana black bear hunter was attacked by a grizzly bear he mistakenly wounded. The guy's hunting partner tried to save him but ended up shooting and killing him.
SUPERIOR, Wis. (AP) - Police say a man has been hospitalized after being mauled by a bear in the southern edge of Superior.
The Duluth News Tribune reports Superior police officers were called to the southern edge of town on a report of a mauling about 8 p.m. Saturday.
Police say the man was with a female hunting partner who had set up over some bait, hoping to take a deer, when the bear appeared. The man tried to chase it off, but the animal turned on him.
BILLINGS, Mont. - A grizzly bear that fatally mauled a hiker in Yellowstone National Park was killed after DNA evidence linked the animal to the scene of a second hiker's death a month later, a park official said Monday.
The decision to euthanize the 250-pound female bear was meant to protect park visitors and staff, Superintendent Dan Wenk said.
Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Bear No. 646 was eventually tracked to a location 1.7 miles southwest of the trapping/mauling site. It was shot dead from a helicopter by U.S. Wildlife Services at 7:15 a.m. on June 19.
After the incident at Kitty Creek, all bear research trapping operations were halted for 50 days until new protocol was established by now-retired IGBST head Chuck Schwartz. Even with the layoff, officials managed to capture a record 95 grizzlies in 2010, 75 of those for bad behavior. In all, 295 grizzly-human conflicts were reported in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), the most since record-keeping began in 1992.
BILLINGS, Mont. -- A hunter attacked by a wounded grizzly in a Montana forest was not killed by the bear, as originally thought, but by a gunshot fired by a hunting buddy trying to save him, authorities say.
An autopsy determined that Steve Stevenson, 39, of Winnemucca, Nev., died of a single gunshot to the chest, Lincoln County Sheriff Roby Bowe said Friday.
The shot was fired by Ty Bell, 20, also of Winnemucca, as he attempted to stop the bear's attack. No charges are expected, Bowe said.
BOISE, Idaho - An Idaho elk hunter who apparently stumbled across a bear's resting spot Saturday was hospitalized after the animal bit him and broke his right arm, officials said.
Richard Paini, 40, suffered puncture wounds and an injured left hand along with the broken forearm in the attack at about 9 a.m. He was taken to the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls.
The dangers of hunting where others have hunted were illustrated this week when an Interior Alaska grizzly bear mauled 65-year-old Donald "Skip" Sanford of Anchorage. Sanford hunting companion Monty Dyson said Thursday that the attack happened after Sanford went back to the site of an earlier moose kill along the Maclaren River, about 250 miles northeast of Alaska's largest city.
Sanford is still recovering from the attack in an Anchorage hospital, and is in no mood to talk.
A California hiker killed by a grizzly in Yellowstone National Park on July 6 - the first fatal bear mauling in Yellowstone in a quarter century, and one of two attacks in the park this year - may have unwittingly provoked the bear by screaming and running away, according to a final report released Tuesday.
The park report suggested that the 58-year-old victim, Brian Matayoshi, of Torrance, California, might have survived his encounter if he and his wife, Marylyn, had heeded posted advisories.
A 39-year-old hunter killed by a wounded grizzly bear yelled out to draw the 400-pound male bear toward him in an effort to keep it from attacking his young hunting partner, the man's family said.
"They both shot it and it kept coming," Steve Stevenson's mom, Janet Price, said on Saturday. "Steve yelled at it to try and distract it, and it swung around and took him down. It's what my son would have done automatically, for anybody."
This summer in Yellowstone National Park, on two separate occasions, two men sadly lost their lives from deadly encounters with grizzly bears. Both of these men did not carry bear pepper spray, and if they would have, they would likely still be alive. As autumn approaches and the leaves begin to change, its time to look at some other changes that will prevent the brutal loss of life that Yellowstone has experienced this year.
Thank God for the bear spray.
Without it, Kevin and Julie Boyer probably wouldn't be alive. Instead, they'd have likely shared the fates of two other hikers who were attacked and killed by grizzly bears this summer inside Yellowstone National Park.
But they did have bear spray. They survived. And they're here to share their story.
A Yellowstone National Park hiker whose body was found mauled last week was killed by a grizzly bear, authorities reported Monday, the second fatal bear attack in the park this summer.
The hiker was identified as 59-year-old John Wallace, a Michigan resident who was traveling alone and had pitched his tent in a campground along the Mary Mountain trail last Wednesday. Wallace's body was discovered on Friday by two hikers in an area of the park that was closed to hikers, according to park services.
The Anmore man injured by a mother bear visited her cubs at Langley's Critter Care animal shelter on Sunday.
"I was the guy who got attacked by the mama bear," Ken Hogue told staff.
"I just had to meet them."
Hogue described his Aug. 8 encounter with the mother bear in the Countryside Village manufactured home park near Buntzen Lake to Angela Fontana, the senior animal care supervisor at Critter Care.
Bears are prowling the wilderness southwest of Aspen and attacking campers even though the humans properly covered food and despite an ample supply of berries.
Just in the past five days, bears attacked three times, including early Saturday morning, when a black bear tore through a tent and mauled the leg of a 51-year-old camper, causing injuries that required surgery.
"Sometimes bears do unpredictable things," said Pat Thrasher, spokesman for the White River National Forest.
Bear attacks are rare but it's best to be safe, says Dan LeGrandeur, who develops bear conflict management plans and teaches bear aversion techniques to emergency personnel and resource workers in B.C. and Alberta.
"Unless you have a lot of interactions with bears, there's all sorts of pre-conceived ideas that they are man-eaters, which is not true," said LeGrandeur, a former B.C. Conservation Officer who used to work in the Tri-Cities and now lives in Alberta and operates Bear Scare.
We have an odd relationship with polar bears.
As we watch them pace inside their zoo enclosures, or marvel at their portrayal within natural history documentaries, we are drawn to their big paws, fluffy white fur and button-like black noses. We find polar bear cubs adorable.
Lana Hollingsworth, 61, died late on Monday at a Scottsdale hospital of complications from the injuries she received when the bear attacked her in Pinetop, in northeast Arizona, her husband Marv Hollingsworth said.
"She was a real animal lover, so it's strange that she was killed by bear," Hollingsworth told Reuters. "But that's the way life can be, I guess."
CTV Ottawa News' Leanne interviews, Martyn Obbart, Steve Herrero and Steven Amstrup at the International Bear Association Conference. Watch three segments here.
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