A 400-pound grizzly bear was trapped and killed by park staff in Yellowstone last week because it posed a risk to public safety in one of the Wyoming park’s busiest areas, according to the National Park Service.
The bear, an 11-year-old male grizzly, overturned bear-resistant dumpsters — some weighing 800 pounds — and pulled trash cans from their concrete bases in search of human garbage. It was able to access food and trash near Old Faithful, as well as near the Nez Perce Picnic Area and the Midway Geyser Basin parking lot, park officials said.
“It’s unfortunate that this bear began regularly seeking out garbage and was able to defeat the park’s bear-resistant infrastructure,” Kerry Gunther, Yellowstone bear management biologist, said. “We go to great lengths to protect bears and prevent them from becoming conditioned to human food. But occasionally, a bear outsmarts us or overcomes our defenses. When that happens, we sometimes have to remove the bear from the population to protect visitors and property.”
The park noted that Yellowstone provides “bear-resistant” food storage lockers at all campgrounds, as well as food storage devices at backcountry campsites, and “bear-resistant dumpsters and garbage cans.”
National Park Service/Allan Barker
Officials also said the last time a bear was killed by park staff in “a management action” was in 2017, when it “removed” a grizzly bear after it damaged tents and got access to food at Heart Lake campsites.
In 2023, another grizzly in the region was killed, after fatally mauling a woman on a forest trail west of Yellowstone and attacking a person in Idaho three years before that. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks shot that bear, a 10-year-old female grizzly, with approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Grizzly bears are protected in the U.S. as a threatened species and it is illegal to harm or kill them except in cases of self-defense or the defense of others, according to the fish and wildlife service. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, with Yellowstone National Park at its core, has been identified by the government agency as a “recovery zone” for grizzly populations.
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