Lifestyles
Dancing With Bears
“So they called me to come and get this bear out of a car,” Carrie Hunt remembers. “And, of course, I’m from Montana and Wyoming, and I’d never dealt with a bear in a car before. But these Yosemite bears were getting into them frequently. And this was our first one.” The bear had peeled into the car—hooked its claws between the door and the frame and literally peeled the door back—to gain entrance.
“Anyway,” Hunt says, “this bear saw these three dogs and three people materialize in front of the hood. I’ll never forget how it looked—its mouth was around the potato chip bag and its hair and nose was all squished up against the glass and it looked up at us like, Who are these guys?”
One of “those guys” was Hunt, a life-long bear biologist who now trains Karelian Bear Dogs to find and harass bears that have invaded garbage dumps, homes and, in this case, the inside of a Chevy Blazer. Hunt and her dogs gave the burglar bear a good talking to and eventually it left the country for good.
In most of the West, problem bears are trapped and relocated, but many return to the scene of the crime, and those that are caught again are usually killed. Hunt, who has a bachelor’s degree in zoology and a masters in wildlife biology, spent the first part of her career as a working biologist and was, she says now, part of a “solution” that just wasn’t working.
Then she hit on a two-pronged approach: 1) She’d educate people to clean up problem areas so bears had less reason to return, and 2) She’d actually work with bears to teach them that garbage dumps were permanently off limits—no matter how enticing they smelled. Part two was where the Karelians came in.
In their native Finland, Karelians are trained to hunt almost anything with fur or feathers. “They work bears like a cow dog works cows,” Hunt explains. “What we teach our dogs is how to push the bear away. They have an innate way of dancing around the animal, but only some of the dogs want to work with bears.” Nine years ago, Hunt brought three Karelians back, and they became the first working bear dogs in the U.S.: Tuffy, Cassie and Rio.
Hunt’s game plan seems to be working. In the last decade, her three original dogs and a houseful of their puppies have worked hundreds of problem bears a year and have yet to provoke a bear into aggression. In fact, Hunt says, they haven’t even had a close call.
But that doesn’t mean her job is what you’d call boring. “One time, we were waiting for this grizzly bear on the North Fork of the Flathead River to come into this house that she had visited before,” Hunt recalls about one Montana bear. “We had our truck positioned in a place where we would be able to quietly open the doors and hit her (the bear) with rubber bullets. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and she must have been debating about whether she wanted to go into the house or not, knowing that there was a vehicle out there that had some kind of life in it.
“By that time, though, it had been about three hours and nothing had happened. We had a young dog and an older dog in the vehicle; the other part of our team was working another bear. Anyway, the dogs had long since given up and fallen asleep. Finally, the bear decided to come in, but she came in right behind the truck and decided to look in the truck first! Of course, the dogs erupted and she ran off.”
Hunt and her partner leashed the dogs and took off after it. That bear, she claims, was one of the toughest she ever worked with, but the dogs eventually got their point across and the bear gave up breaking and entering for a more pastoral existence in the backcountry. Although Hunt’s “ambassadors”—the dogs—are extremely popular with the public, gaining acceptance by state fish and game departments has been an uphill battle. Part of the reason is that the cost of bringing in a team of bear dogs and their handlers is initially more expensive than simply removing the problem animal.
“[Trapping and removing bears] has been a methodology that’s been around for years, but it isn’t working,” Hunt says. Most bears, she claims, eventually return, and many repeat offenders are killed. But the powers that be are coming around, led in part by the acceptance of her methods in other countries.
Believe it or not, one of those countries is Japan. Also believe it or not, Japan has lots of bears. Unfortunately for the dogs, Japan also has a quarantine, and on their first trip, Tuffy and his buddies got thrown in the hoosegow. “We spent four hours a day twice a day going into quarantine trying to keep their spirits up,” Hunt recalls. “Tuffy came out of quarantine in good health but our other two dogs got sick.
“So here he (Tuffy) was, nine years old, and I had to depend on him for all our bear work,” Hunt says. “The very first night we ever worked a bear in Japan, we found one in a subdivision on the outskirts of town. It kept trying to hide, but we kept pushing him out, because we can do that with a dog.
“These guys (the Japanese biologists) had never done anything like that,” Hunt remembers. “They’d never been able to push a bear out of a place and have any kind of control over the direction the bear was going. At one point the bear dove down into a deep riparian ditch with a huge culvert going down the middle. We had to get into it and carry Tuffy across, and right after that the bear went into another home area. We got it out of there and it went into another. Finally, at 6 a.m., we pushed it into a huge forested reserve. It wasn’t 15 minutes later that the sun came up, and for 10 miles back I could see three ridges full of homes we’d pushed that bear through.” Hunt, Tuffy and her Japanese friends had been working the animal since 8 o’clock the previous evening.
Hunt “trains” bears in much the same way a good dog trainer trains dogs—by teaching the bear to choose appropriate behavior. Hunt knows all about training dogs; currently, she has nine Karelians living with her, more or less under the same roof. When approaching a bear in the field, teams of three handlers shoot it with rubber bullets, and then let their three leashed dogs make a wall of sound that intimidates the bruin and gives it an incentive to leave town. It’s harassed only until it gets the message, then is left alone. With enough training, Hunt claims, nearly all the bears they work choose the relative peace and quiet of the woods to another encounter with a yapping, snarling dog, and in making that choice, they spare their lives. For Hunt and her Karelians, it’s all in a day’s work.