WYOMING — Bear and grizzly management has evolved dramatically over the years since wildlife managers began recording conflicts in the early 1900s.
Up until the 1980s, bear and human conflicts were typically solved with bullets. In 1984, University of Montana (UM) master’s student Carrie Hunt focused her thesis on a non-lethal way to deter a bear. She went on to create bear spray and later wrote a report for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that still serves as the basis for federal requirements on the product.
According to UM, Hunt grew up in Chile and studied zoology as an undergraduate in the state of Montana. She joined the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team in Yellowstone National Park (YNP) after college, where she spent three years. A UM article states that, during that time, nearly every female bear Hunt was studying got relocated and later euthanized after conflicts with humans. Hunt went back to school, inspired by the work of bear researchers Frank and John Craighead.
The National Park Service (NPS) states that human-bear interactions looked very different in the early years of YNP. In the 1880s, bears started feeding on garbage in open-pit dumps and outside of park hotels at night, while hundreds of people gathered to watch the spectacle. Bears began seeking human food along park roads in 1910, and visitors willingly fed them and took photos. The first confirmed bear-caused fatality occurred in 1916.
“Beginning in 1931, park managers recorded an average of 48 bear-inflicted human injuries and more than 100 incidents of property damage each year in Yellowstone,” NPS wrote. “In 1960, the park implemented a bear management program directed primarily at black bears and designed to reduce the number of bear-caused human injuries and property damages and to re-establish bears in a natural state.”
It wasn’t until 1970 that YNP eliminated open-pit garbage dumps inside the park. The Craighead brothers predicted that bears would begin to range more widely, causing more conflicts with humans. This was initially true, with an annual average of 38 grizzlies and 23 black bears being relocated to backcountry areas and an annual average of 12 grizzlies and six black bears being removed from the population. Eventually, bear-human conflicts decreased to an annual average of 10 after 1972, and bear removals also decreased.
Armed with the historic realities of bear management, Hunt got to work on her bear research in 1981 at UM with only $500 in funding. She was asked to test the efficacy of skunk repellent on charging bears.
“This wasn’t what I wanted to do,” Hunt told UM. “But I thought about all those bears getting in trouble in Yellowstone and decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to start looking at deterrents.”
Hunt soon discovered Halt, which is a capsaicin-derived pepper spray that postal delivery workers used to deter dogs. She set up testing sites at garbage dumps and recorded whether the bears charged or ran away, and how long they stayed away. Those first tests of the bear spray delivered consistent results: the spray turned away every bear that was tested.
Hunt then worked with Vietnam veteran Bill Pounds to package the bear spray in a canister that would spray a cone-shaped cloud at least 20 feet. Pounds founded Counter Assault, the first bear spray to be registered with the Environmental Protection Agency. UM stated that Hunt did not want to run a business, so she gave her recipe to Pounds in exchange for a lifetime supply of bear spray.
Last year, a grizzly bear was removed from the YNP population after learning to flip dumpsters. That was the first grizzly bear to be killed in a management action in the park since 2017. Between 1960 and the 2000s, human injuries from bears have decreased from 45 per year to one per year. On average, less than one bear must be killed or removed from the park per year, down from 37 in 1960.
“When I started all this, there was no science of human-wildlife conflict,” Hunt told UM. “I wanted to make a difference for bears and for how humans and animals relate to one another.”
