JACKSON HOLE, WYO – The National Park Service didn’t always practice healthy wildlife hygiene. In fact, there was a period in Yellowstone’s history that park rangers would likely sooner forget.
The tacit, unwritten policy in the early 1900s was to look the other way when it came to how bear encounters were handled. By today’s standards, Yellowstone officials set a perfectly horrendous example of how NOT to conduct oneself in the wild with wild animals.
A less-than-stellar past
As if the lax attitude toward bear encounters wasn’t enough, things went from bad to worse beginning in 1919 when Horace Albright took over as superintendent of Yellowstone. Albright was all about commercializing Yellowstone to the horror of modern-day conservationists and the ultimate ruin of any semblance of a nature encounter.
Claiming the Park Service had a “duty to present wildlife as a spectacle,” Albright instituted a circus-like atmosphere in Yellowstone that bordered on an all-out zoo. In fact, at least two separate zoos operated inside the park at one time.
Many are familiar with the so-called ‘hold-up’ bears that accosted traveling motorists along the road. These were mostly pesky black bears that could be appeased with the bribe of a Twinkie or whatever tourists had on hand in the station wagon.
But that was just the beginning. Park rangers went from being complicit in setting a bad bear example to outright promoting a culture of naughty.
Under Albright, the ‘Lunch Counter for Bears’ was established behind Old Faithful Inn complete with bleacher seating for hundreds. The dinner show was billed in a 1920 hotel brochure as a place where one could “photograph a wild bear and eat a course dinner in the same hour.”
A larger bear feeding frenzy took place at Canyon Hotel as well. The spectacle sometimes drew a reported 50-70 bruins at a time, snacking on food refuse bait tossed there by park employees. No one saw anything wrong with the practice, after all, a fed bear was a happy bear, tourists got a show and the park got rid of its garbage.
It didn’t stop there. Albright also built a bison corral and stocked it with a dozen or so of the park’s finest buffalo. At one point there were at least two actual ‘zoos’ inside Yellowstone where showcase animals like deer and badgers could be seen up close.
Surprisingly, the bad example set by the park did not result in the human mortality rate one might expect. Scratches, bites, and knockdowns were a fairly regular occurrence but only one fatality—a park employee killed by a grizzly—was recorded during the heyday of hilarity lasting a decade.
Returning to sanity
The unsafe practices were phased out by better-informed wildlife biologists and conservationists after Albright’s departure in 1929. Begging bears continued to be a problem in Yellowstone through the 60s and 70s, but the consistent messaging that continues today eventually gave way to a more natural experience we see today.
A few of these long-gone examples of how not to interact with wildlife might be a good reminder for some of today’s visitors who still occasionally fail to understand how to keep wildlife truly wild.
