They do not bother me, do not come near my home and have never destroyed anything. A couple of cubs chewed the rubber handle on my cement mixer and also chewed the control knob on my wood splitter control lever.That's all in a period of 12 years.
I do not leave any food around that would entice them.But I would shoot one should it come up on my deck to get at the grease on my BBQ.
So the whole thing about bad neighbors depends on circumstantial balance, not on whether they make bad neighbors. My brother in law raises Belgian draft horses, and when a mare is about to drop a baby, the bears can sense it and hang around close.So he HAS TO shoot them and bury them using an excavator.That's his balance by necessity.
When the bears are on my grown up pastures eating apples .I carry a pump action Benelli shotgun into my wood lot where I cut firewood,one with an unmodified barrel loaded with rifled slugs and 00 buck. The mag is extended and will hold 7 rounds altogether. Since the barrel is a cylinder with no choke, the slugs are quite accurate out to 100 yards.
Remember one thing.
Bears are eating machines in the fall and have a voracious appetite. A human is nothing more than a skin bag full of meat to them.A bear within 200 yards of you is way too close.Black bears stalk humans.They follow scent.
All the noise, all the bear spray, and all the tactics used against bears , often advised by naturalists, do not work on a hungry bear, all that just pisses them off when they are hungry. They get so hungry that they may not even feel a bullet entering their bodies , just the push of it but not pain.
So the trick is to not attract bears, do not leave garbage or food around.Stay away and leave them alone if you can. If they invade your secure space, drop them and haul them away,or bury them. If not , the rotting carcass will just attract more bears and you will have to shoot more of them and then you are on a treadmill. Bears can smell a rotting bear carcass or bear blood on the ground from 20 miles away.Do not shoot a bear unless you have a way of disposing of it that does not attract more of them.
Finally I refer you to the story of FReeper Kanawa ( Tom Tilley) who had to jump onto a black bear's back and stab it to death with a 6 inch buck hunting knife to save his dog.
How long before the meat is tender?
Regards,
I let the bears that come around my house very unwelcome.