Dumb and Getting Dumber About Brown Bears

“Their greatest value no doubt lies in the universal interest of the public in seeing and photographing them in their natural habitat, and since they can be observed along most any good salmon stream when the fish are running, they provide a wonderful tourist attraction. For the sportsmen seeking a trophy, however, other areas in Alaska offer larger and more desirable specimens.”

  • Referencing bears in the Chilkat Valley, from “Haines, Alaska: An Economic Study,” by the Alaska Development Board, 1953.

We only get so many brown bears per year. So when we kill 30 of them for getting into our garbage, there are none left for us to hunt.

That’s bear economics, as explained by the Department of Fish and Game to a Haines crowd on a Zoom call Thursday. It’s simple stuff, but we’re not particularly smart when it comes to our thinking about these animals.

Between hunting bears and shooting them for getting into garbage we left out, we killed at least 49 brown bears in 2020. That’s a big chunk of a population roughly estimated at 200-300 in an area that includes the Chilkat Valley, Skagway and Katzehin.

So instead of a quota of 15 to 20, only five bears will be allocated to hunters this year. If we kill more than that, Fish and Game may subtract those from the number allowed to be taken in 2022.

That’s tough medicine but pretty simple math.

Fish and Game can do this because the bears aren’t ours. Our bears are owned by the State of Alaska which won’t allow people in Haines, through their negligence and lack of local enforcement, to wipe out the local population.

This also is bear economics: A mature brown bear is worth $18,000 to a professional guide, according to Larry Benda, who has led hunts here for 25 years. Over its lifetime, a brown bear along the Chilkoot River is worth between $1 million and $2 million to local wildlife-watching tours, said Dan Egolf, who has led such tours for 40 years.

As much as this metaphor has been overused in Haines, we are killing our golden goose. We are taking piles of cash and setting them on fire with every bear we attract and kill. Our town has been guilty of some dumb moves in the past, but arguably none more stupid than this: We get a world-class attraction for absolutely free, then we proceed to kill it, literally.

If the Haines Chamber of Commerce, Haines Borough, and Haines Police Department can’t find a permanent solution to the wanton killing of bears, they need to shut up about supporting economic development.

The solution to this problem isn’t difficult. In 2019, Sitka police handed out three-dozen citations to residents for not safely stowing trash, causing a bear problem there. In 2020, Sitka issued 51 citations.

“It’s hard to get people to change their behavior,” a Sitka officer told me. “They don’t want to be inconvenienced.”

More to the point considering that Haines Borough Police Chief Heath Scott not has only failed to enforce the town’s bear ordinance, he himself was culpable for shooting a bear attracted to garbage he left outside: the State of Alaska in 1993 prosecuted City of Haines police officer Sam Smith for shooting a bear he’d attracted to his backyard.

The state dropped Smith’s prosecution in exchange for an agreement by the municipality to establish and follow a written policy on responding to problem bears, including procedures on when officers were permitted to kill them. The state also directed the city council to consider drafting an ordinance requiring residents to properly secure garbage and other bear attractants.

The Haines Borough passed that law in 2010, after another yet another summer of needless bear kills.

Like police officer Smith, Heath Scott should have been charged for illegal take of a brown bear. That would have sent the necessary message to Scott, the police force, and the town that bears aren’t ours to kill as we like.

This issue should be about common sense and not the law, but apparently we’re too thick to handle it any other way: People who attract, then shoot bears must pay a price for their thievery of a very valuable public resource.