Meanwhile in Katmai National Park in Alaska, famous for the high number of brown bears who gather at the Brooks River to feast on salmon and Fat Bear Week, the NPS requires visitors to attend a 30 minute Bear School but doesn’t limit the number of fisherfolk or photographers in the river and doesn’t have enough staff to enforce the rules. The goal is to prevent the bears from associating humans with food, but people are regularly far too close to bears, take food out of the designated safe areas and generally behave recklessly. Visitors once threw a salmon at a bear so they could get pictures. I’m part of a Discord group that watches the live cams through Explore.dotorg and we have taken to documenting what is rapidly becoming ‘People Cam’ instead of bear cam. Explore has a rule that humans can’t be shown on the cams and there are times the cams just can’t follow a bear because of people in sight. Parents are also bringing small children. The trails and roads are regularly shared by bears and humans, so this seems very risky. Every year or so a cub is killed by a male bear, not because it likes to kill cubs but because its prey instinct was triggered or it was already in fight mode and the cub was just in the way. so the park’s attitude that the bears are habituated to human presence and won’t attack is a fantasy. Katmai NP is a ticking time bomb and it’s going to be bad. The entire Park Service needs more money for rangers so the rules can be actually enforced, violators should be banned from the parks and the number of humans allowed into Katmai, and especially in the river needs to be reduced and controlled. Bears are going to be bears, but humans are going to be human. It’s a dangerous mix.
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