Hello Jaz,
Actually, no, I am not Dr. Rogers. I am Dr. Stephen Stringham. I have personally had over 10,000 close encounters with grizzly and black bears. I have been researching their behavior for nearly 40 years.
I agree with you that bears should not be purposefully attracted to inhabited areas. However, what evidence — rather than speculation — do you have that she attracted bears to any inhabited area, rather than drawing bears from surrounding inhabited areas to her own home? What evidence do you have that she increased risk of either depredations or human injury to anyone but herself? What evidence do you have that even the risk to herself was significant?
Yes, bears are predators. (Dogs are also predators and kill a LOT more people than black bears do.) But black bears prey primarily on small mammals, fish and invertebrates. That’s why Dr. Rogers in Minnesota and I in Alaska (previously also in California, Montana, upstate New York and Vermont) have rarely worried at all about being attacked by the black bears. Yes, there is risk. But compared to all the other risks we face in daily life, risk of black bear attack is very small.
We sympathize, of course, with anyone who is injured or whose loved-one is injured — whether the injury comes from falling off a bicycle, being involved in a car crash, being bitten by an animal, downhill skiing, etc. (Remember how the wife of actor Liam Niesson recently died of a minor fall on a bunny ski slope because she whacked her head on the snow and her brain bled. I too have been injured skiing, doing gymnastics, spring-board diving, driving a pickup, etc.; a hunter’s bullet once grazed my ear. Yet who among us would advocate banning any of those activities, all of which can injure people as badly as a bear can? ) The issue is not whether life has risks, but how much risk is added by any given thing we do or someone else does.
Please don’t let the severity of the worst bear attacks mislead you into thinking that the probability of such attacks is high. There are situations which do produce high attack risk, and other situations minimize risk. From what I know of Ms. Noyes’ actions, they likely reduced risk overall in the region where she lives.
If increasing risk to people would be a crime, why wouldn’t reducing risk be a virtue? Maybe “heroine” is too strong a word, but decades of experience with bears suggest to me that she has done her community a service, not harm.
As in most of life, the benefit or detriment of an activity depends not just on the kind of activity, but on where, when and how it is conducted. To take just one more example, shooting firearms in a school is far too dangerous for anyone but whackos to consider; but shooting in the deep woods is considered acceptably safe even though hunters occasionally kill innocent bystanders. Indeed, when I visit salmon streams where anglers are armed with rifles and shotguns, I am far more worried about being hit by a stray bullet than by a bear — a sentiment shared by a great many Alaskans.
If you are really interested in cutting edge knowledge about bear behavior, rather than just in perpetuating conventional “wisdom,” read the references I listed. I suspect that you, like my students, will be amazed about how badly the danger of bear attack has been exaggerated, and how readily bears become good neighbors.
Will we ever see you again on this forum? The post-mortem we've got planned ought to be illuminating.
I suspect you would be amazed at how many people are actually killed yearly by black bears. You are an idiot. There was an article on FR two days ago about a person who fed bears very similar to the woman in this article. Guess what? She was eaten by, wait for it, a black bear just this last week. How amazing is that? I have been around bears and other wild animals since I was a child, I am now 67 years old and I am here to tell you that if you feed a dangerous wild animal you will either get yourself or someone else killed.Period.