Anchorage Daily News

Thirty years later, I can still remember Don McKnight, then the director of wildlife research for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, talking about the bear he had to shoot.

The memory was awakened recently by the killing of another bear by a team of National Park Service researchers studying vegetation in a remote corner of Denali National Park and Preserve.

When most people think about bears shot in self defense, they think about charging grizzlies. But there is another kind of dangerous bear out there -- the predaceous black bear.

A real rarity in most of North America, these dangerous bears pop up occasionally in the Far North. Back in 1977, geologist Cythia Dusel-Bacon lost both arms to one that attacked her in a thicket north of Fairbanks and tried to eat her alive.

In 1992, Darcy Staver and her husband, Michael, retreated to the roof of a cabin near Glennallen after being pursued by another. Michael eventually decided to go for help. While he was gone, the bear got up on the roof and killed Darcy.

Canadian bear expert Stephen Herrero has compiled data on these and about 50 other predaceous attacks and says there are similarities in many of the incidents:

Black bears that attack and kill people with an eye toward eating them tend to be young bears in wild areas where human contacts are rare.

In June of this year, one such bear attacked and killed a 70-year-old grandmother in northern Quebec.

Cecile Lavoie and her 73-year-old husband, Alexandre, were fishing in a remote area about 350 miles northwest of Ottawa, according to The Globe and Mail, the Toronto-based newspaper with a national readership.

"As she scouted a fishing hole for walleye, Ms. Lavoie became separated from her husband," the newspaper reported. "Barely 10 minutes later, Mr. Lavoie felt something was amiss and went searching for his wife of 51 years. Meters away he came upon the nightmarish scene of her body being dragged into the forest by a bear.

"Mr. Lavoie chased the predator for nearly 200 metres and managed very briefly to scare it away from his wife. He tried but was unable to carry her limp and bleeding body back through the dense spring foliage."

Eventually the husband went to get help. When he came back with authorities, his wife was dead, and police had a difficult time driving the bear off her body.

Long ago, McKnight told me about his encounter with a black bear that similarly lacked a fear of humans.

We were both living in Juneau at the time, and the subject came up during a discussion about Admiralty Island grizzly bears. McKnight spent a fair amount of time on Admiralty, as did I back then, and never worried all that much about the bears.

Like most people who've spent a lot of time around coastal grizzlies, he'd found them to be generally tolerant animals that seldom cause problems unless someone gets inside their personal space.

He had a different opinion about black bears.

Though black bears are generally more docile and less dangerous than their larger cousins, a crazy one pops up on occasion, he said.

McKnight then told about an encounter with a black bear that approached his tent in northern Alaska.

He opened the flap, and there was the bear. The biologist fired a warning shot across its nose.

The bear simply ignored the warning shot and stared at McKnight. McKnight said the look sent a chill up his spine.

At that point, the biologist did the sensible thing. He stopped wasting ammunition and shot the bear dead.

Alaska, like much of North America, has lots and lots of black bears.

Killing the extremely rare bear that looks at people as potential food is not simply justifiable, it's sensible.

So when the National Park Service this week revealed that one of its field crews shot an aggressive black bear in Denali Park on the Fourth of July, it was hard for me to get too excited. Some will, no doubt, be offended that park personnel would actually kill a bear in the park.

The park exists to protect the animals, right?

In general, yes. But not all animals deserve protection. Some animals need to die, and this sounds like one of them. From all reports, this bear had all the signs of that ursine oddity -- the predaceous black bear.

A sub-adult black-bear, it approached a field camp 20 miles from Wonder Lake at the end of the park road late at night, park spokeswoman Maureen McLaughlin said.

"The team responded (by) yelling, arm waving, and throwing objects at the bear,'' she said. "After initially being chased off, the bear circled back to the camp three or four times, and at one point, the animal destroyed one of the team's tents. On its final approach, the black bear aggressively charged the three researchers, hissing and pouncing at the ground. An attempt to divert the bear with pepper spray was ineffective."

Make note of that last sentence. As has been observed elsewhere, bear spray will repel some of the bears all of the time, and all of the bears some of the time. But it won't repel all of the bears all of the time, which it is probably why it was a good thing the Park Service botanists had a gun.

It's a lot easier to kill a bear with a gun than with an ax or a homemade spear, which is the way it was done by Alaska Natives long ago, who were far braver and far tougher than you or I.

"In accordance with policy set forth in the park's Bear-Human Conflict Management Plan, one of the researchers made the decision to shoot the bear when it charged within 20 feet of the team and posed immediate hazard to human safety. The employee, who was qualified and authorized by the National Park Service to carry and use firearms in the park, hit the bear in its mid-section with a 12-gauge shotgun slug," McLaughlin wrote in a press release.

"Despite considerable blood loss, the wounded bear moved into dense vegetation and out of view."

The cavalry was summoned by radio. Two law enforcement rangers and one backcountry ranger were flown in by helicopter.

They found a blood trail, but gave up the chase when the bear went into thick brush.

An aerial search using the helicopter and an airplane couldn't find the wounded animal.

So the park declared it dead, or soon to be dead, and everyone went home.

Some might question these latter responses, but the shooting itself would appear more than justifiable.

Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. Find him online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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