Anchorage Daily News

The bearly bearable summer of 2008 continued in Cooper Landing today with the shooting of a sow grizzly in a dumpster at the community's waste-transfer site.

The death of the sow brings to about a dozen the number of grizzlies killed or believed killed in and around the Kenai Peninsula community since May. And it comes only two weeks after a grizzly seriously mauled a 21-year-old employee of the Kenai Princess lodge as she walked on a wide gravel path near the popular tourist accommodation.

Alaska State Trooper Sgt. Rex Leath said the sow shot today was the leader of a family of bears that had been causing trouble along the northwest shore of Kenai Lake for much of the summer. Two of her cubs were locked in a horse trailer by local cowboy Alex Kime in early July.

Kime called the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to come get them. Biologists with the state agency tranquilized the relocated the bears.

By last weekend, Leath said, all of the bears were back at the waste transfer site looking for human leftovers.

"They're just acclimated to the garbage, and they won't go away,'' Leath said.

Cooper Landing resident Wayne Koecher said today's activities began with the sow ripping the lid off one of the dumpsters at the site where local refuse is collected to be hauled away to the Kenai borough's sanitary landfill.

"Those were supposed to be bearproof dumpsters they installed there,'' said Mary Louise Molenda, who runs the nearby Sunrise Inn.

The grizzly, however, quickly unbearproofed the 8-foot-tall, industrial-style dumpster by ripping off the lid of corrugated metal, Koecher said. She then dropped inside, expecting to find tasty human goodies.

Instead, Koecher said, she landed in an empty dumpster, and with no garbage bags to stand on, she couldn't get out.

From the banging and roaring go on inside the dumpster, he added, it was clear "she was pissed off.''

An Alaska State Troopers were eventually summoned to guard the dumpster and keep anyone from getting too close.

"I heard they closed the dump,'' Molenda added.

Two Fish and Game employees were summoned from Soldotna to deal with the problem, and they shot the bear, Leath said.

There was no other choice, he added. Bears that become addicted to garbage are not easily cured.

At some point, biologist have noted, they get so hooked it's not even worth trying to relocate them, because they hit the ground running in a search for any nearby garbage.

Not to mention that Alaska has such large and healthy bear populations these days that relocating bears simply means dropping them into some other bear's habitat. In such cases, the newcomer either moves and takes over the area or is forced out by the resident bear.

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