Anchorage stinks.
Americans discard approximately 25 percent of the food and beverages they buy. On any given day Alaska's largest city, perched on the edge of bear country, holds nearly a thousand tons of rotting food.
When the odiferous waste inevitably attracts bears, the most popular solution is not to move the trash, but to punish the bears. It's as if we don't want to inconvenience the people who are causing the problem.
This strategy has been pursued for the past century, ever since Anchorage was founded. It hasn't worked yet.
Gov. Bill Walker's role in relocating a black bear and her cubs from Government Hill to Portage Valley is the latest case in point.
Not a bear problem
Last summer the female black bear routinely led her four cubs into Government Hill, a small, densely populated neighborhood abutting Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER). She was looking for food in people's garbage, birdseed, dog kibbles, whatever she could get. It wasn't hard to find.
Nearby JBER encompasses thousands of acres of bear habitat. But urban bears know that people keep the tastiest foods to themselves. The sow had found food in Government Hill for years. Sows with access to nutritious human foods give birth to larger litters.
When the bear returned this spring with her four nearly grown cubs -- which should have been no surprise to anyone -- the risk factor increased significantly. Black bears aren't as dangerous as brown bears, but cubs are adept at getting into trouble, then hollering for mom to come and get them out. We really shouldn't tolerate packs of brazen bears roaming around an urban neighborhood.
Last summer Fish and Game biologists repeatedly asked Government Hill residents to store trash where bears couldn't get to it. Some complied, some didn't.
Last week, when wildlife biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game told residents that despite the department's best efforts, the bears would have to be euthanized, the story was published in newspapers and other media from Seattle to London. Gov. Walker was inundated by a tidal wave of warm and fuzzy. The bears don't deserve to die, hundreds of people cried. Move them out of Anchorage, they pleaded.
When Fish and Game reversed its long-standing policy to euthanize dangerous bears in urban areas, one website trilled that the bears were "saved by a miraculous moment of compassion."
Now its Portages problem
Never mind that relocation seldom pays off for the bear.
Well-known bear expert Lynn Rogers summarized success rates from 11 states and provinces of moving adult black bears. Rogers found the longest distance a bear returned was 169 miles. Eighty-one of 100 bears moved up to 50 miles found their way home. According to Rogers, "The rest gave up, were shot, or were hit by vehicles." Other researchers have come to the same conclusion, emphasizing that adult bears are particularly adept at finding their way home.
Portage Valley is only 40 air miles from Government Hill. But kicking the bears farther down the road isn't really an option either. When I was Anchorage's wildlife biologist, my counterpart on the Kenai Peninsula told me he didn't want any more of Anchorage's bears. The biologist who managed the Matanuska-Susitna Valley told me the same thing.
The problem is there are few places in Alaska more than a long day's walk from a town, village, lodge, fish camp, or tent. Any bear who has learned that humans hoard bear food may soon revisit its bad habit, even if it doesn't return to its home range.
Pity the poor campers with a sheet of "rip-stop" nylon between them and a large family of hungry bears who want their food.
And whose idea was it to drop five human-habituated and potentially dangerous bears off in Portage Valley? Portage Valley has two campgrounds with 70 sites managed by the U.S. Forest Service. People live in Portage. Here, take our bears. Shoot them if you need to. Just don't tell the bleeding hearts in Anchorage who can't seem to keep them out of their garbage.
If the bears aren't killed in Portage Valley, they'll soon show up in Whittier (5 miles). Or Girdwood (10 miles). Or Hope (22 miles). Or Cooper Landing (36 miles). Truth is, those bears can't walk in any direction without running into more people and their garbage.
And if the bears aren't killed in those towns, they'll find their way back to Anchorage. What'll we do then? Why, we'll shoot them, of course.
So let's be clear. Fish and Game isn't moving the bears for the bears' sake. It's for people.
A people problem
Last year the Anchorage regional landfill buried 320,000 tons of garbage, approximately 877 tons per day. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 14.5 percent of Americans' trash is bear food. In Anchorage, this amounts to about 127 tons per day.
All the garbage isn't taken to the landfill every day. It's allowed to putrefy -- typically outside in plastic bags, polyethylene containers with loose-fitting lids, or dumpsters -- for a week at a time. On average, about 890 tons of bear food accumulates every week.
Everyone who lives in Anchorage knows we are surrounded by bears. Most know that bears make regular forays into neighborhoods. Black bears eat grasses and other green plants, berries, and the occasional moose calf or salmon carcass in town, but what they're really after is garbage.
Any way you shovel it, Anchorage is a 200-square-mile bait bucket.
Rogers believes relocated bears use their phenomenal noses to find their way home. A bloodhound's sense of smell is 300 times better than ours. A bear's sense of smell is seven times better than a bloodhound's.
If a polar bear can smell a seal across 40 miles of ice, it's entirely likely that a black bear can smell Anchorage from the other end of Turnagain Arm.
I'm amazed that more bears don't follow their noses to our all-you-can-eat buffet. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans discard about 800 calories worth of food per person every day. If so, Anchorage's 290,000 residents amass something like 232 million calories of bear food daily.
For much of the summer a black bear consumes 5,000 to 8,000 calories a day. Let's go with 5,000 calories because Anchorage's bears are smaller than average.
Although less than 200 black bears rummage through the urban and suburban communities stretching from Eklutna to Girdwood, we throw away enough pizza, fried chicken, double-stuffed cookies and other goodies to feed over 46,000 black bears.
Much of it is offered up on a platter. I've patrolled the streets in many residential neighborhoods the night before garbage collection day. By early evening about one-quarter to one-third of the houses have already carried their garbage to the curb, usually from its more permanent location on the back deck or leaned up against the house. Dumpster lids are left open all over the city.
In addition to rummaging through our garbage, bears sample from tons of birdseed and pet food. Anchorage residents have hung thousands of bird feeders. Three pounds of birdseed can feed a bear for a day. Anchorage residents own about 150,000 dogs and cats, and many are fed outdoors. Most brands of dry dog food contain 300 to 600 calories per cup.
Anchorage is the land of milk and honey every bear is promised as a cub.
Solving the problem
Some people believe that relocation solves the problem whether the bears die or not. However, there are plenty more bears roaming JBER and Chugach State Park. It won't be long before another bear realizes that Government Hill is a lot less crowded, bear-wise, than it has been and settles in.
Solving the problem shouldn't be that difficult.
Alaska Waste, the company that picks up most of the city's trash, has offered its customers bear-resistant containers for a decade. Ironically, the municipality's department of Solid Waste Services -- which serves many of the neighborhoods closest to JBER -- is still toying with the idea. If Solid Waste Services offered bear-resistant containers, the sow and her cubs might not have been lured into Government Hill.
I say "might not" because bear-resistant containers are optional. No one is forced to use them. Unfortunately, most Anchorage residents don't think they need them, or aren't willing to pay a few dollars extra during the summer months. Even when Fish and Game obtained funding, primarily from BP Exploration (Alaska), to subsidize the extra cost during summer 2008, less than half of the residents of Muldoon, a neighborhood with plenty of bears raiding its garbage, could be convinced to participate.
After we wave a fond farewell to the departing bear family (may they rest in peace), everyone in this city needs to swivel their heads 180 degrees and notice the piles of garbage in their neighborhood. That's the problem, right there under your noses.
If everyone who called and wrote Gov. Walker demanding or begging him to relocate the bears had asked him to help fix the city's garbage problem, we might have made some real progress. And saved dozens of bears to boot.
Finding fault
I don't like it, but it's hard to find fault with Gov. Walker's decision to reverse the department's policy, as long as it's just this once. I'd rather have a politician who wanted to save the bears than one whose knee-jerk reaction was to kill every bear in the city.
Walker admits he reconsidered the plan to euthanize the bears after hearing from "hundreds of good people." Well, the good people need to wise up. Relocation seldom works. Cleaning up the trash does.
Years ago Juneau passed a city ordinance that fines people who allow bears access to their garbage. Anchorage could do the same.
Years ago I was talking about bear management to a biology class at Bartlett High School. When I mentioned keeping garbage in my garage, a student made a rude noise. "Your family doesn't store garbage in the garage?" "No," she said emphatically, "it stinks!" I guess college is where kids are supposed to learn problem-solving skills nowadays.
I realize many people don't have garages. However, everyone produces garbage and has to set it down somewhere. Why not in a bear-resistant container? And what's wrong with recycling? Most families could easily cut their garbage in half by not including paper, glass and plastics.
If we clean up the garbage, we'll solve most of the problems with bears.
My neighbor brought home a couple of seven-week-old feeder pigs this week. I went down and admired them. Little pigs are cute, but they stink. Pigs, I'm told, have the ability to be as clean as any animal. However, pigs are perfectly happy to wallow in their trough until their food becomes garbage and has to be shoveled out of their pens with the poop.
I'd like to think we are smarter than bears and cleaner than pigs. The only way to prove that would be to clean up Anchorage's ubiquitous garbage and stop attracting more bears.
Rick Sinnott is a former Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist. The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News. Contact him at rickjsinnott@gmail.com
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.