Woman gets 4-day jail sentence for being too close to Grizzly bear and cubs at Yellowstone

Originally published at: Woman gets 4-day jail sentence for being too close to Grizzly bear and cubs at Yellowstone | Boing Boing

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Maybe the bear can visit her in prison?

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That’s nasty. She can’t move away when in jail even if she wanted to. It’ll get her convicted as a repeat offender.

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Don’t feed the BEARS, with yourself.

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They roam freely in their natural habitat and when threatened will react accordingly

That really should be: “They roam freely in their natural habitat and when they feel threatened will react accordingly.” Because you can’t reason with them. “No, I was just taking pictures.” is not going to convince a bear that you aren’t going to hurt her cubs.

I hope that this woman does not feel put upon and realizes just how lucky she is. My father once told me about the time he almost missed his train, but managed to jump aboard when it was already moving. The conductor reamed him out. “Have you ever seen somebody get their legs cut off by the wheels of a train? Because I have and I never want to see that again.”
“You know, he was right,” is how he would end the story.

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As Grizzly Man subject Timothy Treadwell was repeatedly warned by friends before his demise, “getting your dumb ass eaten by a Grizzly is going to result in the bears you profess to love getting shot.”

Not just dangerous, it’s also selfish.

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I’ve seen too many bears, brown and black, have to be euthanized because they got too acclimated to humans and there was no place or budget to relocate them. One was at Philmont, a brown bear that had learned hiker’s packs usually had food, or at least “smellables” such as toothpaste, deodorant, or scented toilet paper, and had returned from several relocations to as far as they could move it, but kept returning. The other was in upstate NY, a black bear that kept breaking into homes to get at the food, sometimes homes with people still in them.

Don’t feed the bears.

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I wouldn’t want to be close to a mother grizzly and cubs.

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I took this picture on a trip to Yellowstone a few years back. It was technically outside of the park boundaries, on the road between Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

We stayed in the car, but look at those fucking idiots walking up to get a better shot.

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Holy crap, look at her total lack of response to a freaking charging grizzly bear, too. I feel like people need some mandatory education before being allowed into natural spaces, required to pass some sort of “nature test.”

Though it occurs to me, if that’s her reaction speed to an imminent threat, maybe she was moving away from the bears the whole time, but just at a similarly glacial pace…

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I’m halfway through reading Mary Roach’s latest book, Fuzz, which is about wild animals that run afoul of the law and has a whole chapter on bear/human encounters and mitigations. It was disappointing to learn that relocation, while often successful in getting a bear out of a particular neighborhood, is very rarely successful if your metric is for the bear to thrive in its new location. The bears don’t know where to effectively find food, water, and shelter in their unfamiliar surroundings and often die within a year. The ones with Cubs very rarely do well.

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Obviously the woman was a fool to get anywhere near that close, but not turning and running when being charged may have been the one thing she did right. From the National Park Service website about bear encounters:

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Well, she does turn and flee, only after the fact. During, she seems to not register it at all. I’m guessing she’s so focused on the camera, she’s not aware of what it’s actually doing until it (would have been) too late.

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You, my friend, have a three digit IQ.

And Therein… | The Annotated Fall

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My understanding is that one of the things in the grizzly bear’s natural diet is those cute little black bears, which themselves are very strong and not something you want to mess with. So, you should definitely not mess with something that eats them.

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She’s safer in jail

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A famous Polish actor died trying to do that.

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Is she not aware that bears have a right to bear arms protected by natural law the world over; and double-protected in the United States?