The REAL Bear Report

Why Douglas and I set the bear thing up in Lions Bay was because what was happening here was some people were attracting bears with outdoor freezers, garbage or beehives. They would call in the Conservation Officers and the bears would be shot. Didn’t sound fair, really.

This had being going down here for years. In the old days here people would shoot bears out their window, so I guess having a government guy who knew how to shoot without winging a local was an improvement. Around the time we started the COS shot 3000 bears in BC one third of those were cubs. Some people were closing bear traps, and some, like ourselves were setting up bear groups.

We were really not impressed with the way the COS were dealing with our bears.

I will give you some examples. A bear was shot on the lawn of a local. The CO opens the mouth of the bear and says ‘’ see the broken tooth? It was an old bear and suffering, we just put it out of it’s misery ‘’. Well, old bears are very rare here; they can live 30 years and I've never seen one. I have seen two bears in their prime here, one female and one male; impressive animals, but neither hung around for long. Age has something to do with size, but you can get smallish old bears. It’s their diet that determines size. If they have a Salmon stream handy they can grow huge.

You can tell a mature bear from a teenager by the shape of its skull. It keeps growing. The wider the head the older the bear. The smaller the ears in proportion to the head, the older the bear. Most of the bears here are young and like the one on the lawn, 3-5 years old. We had seen that bear intermittingly since it was a cub.

And, oh yes, according to my buddies authors Charlie Russell and Ben Kilham, most bears that hang around an urban environment soon have broken teeth; they just aren't designed for metal. I went on a bear walk with those guys and 20 other bear biologists and that was one of things I wanted to know.

At the time we set up our bear group many people thought most bears were relocated. This was because the  MOE was telling anyone who would listen that was what was happening. In fact most bears were shot. Even today in the best-run areas the ratio is 50% shot, 50% relocated.

Another story bruited about by the MOE is Bears become addicted to garbage kind of like crack; it happens, but not here that I’ve noticed. I think the reason we don’t have the problem and Whistler does is the huge amount of food served in their restaurants every day.

We have years where there is no food in the watershed like last year. We get bears, and when it gets cold they den up. The point is the next year they don’t come back. All that being said there are some, usually young males, that will get chucked out by Mom.(females are kept in the sows’ territory) and end up down here trying to get by. These are the prime ones to get identified and re-located. As well, young males are the most likely to survive relocation.

Anyway we got a free pager from Rogers, ask people to call us instead of the COS and by golly most of them did. Then we set out to do the COs job for them and did excellent work. We passed some of the first bear bylaws in BC. Pertaining to attractants and bear proofed as much of the village as we could with the help of some grants we obtained from the BC government. Most of the rest of our bear program we paid for out of our own pockets. We went to calls and tried to solve villagers’ bear problems. We got one bear relocated because he was causing a lot of fuss, and tried to trap others. Council has stopped our program and is trying to replace it with something quite different.
Norma Rodgers, who seems to be in charge of changing our program, is telling people in the bear community that ‘’I don’t get it’’. That would be; I don’t understand how the bear situation will be in the future in Lions Bay. The number on the cute bear fridge magnet you got with your taxes is a direct line to the COS. Lions Bay will have no say in the fate of our bears. It took me months to get someone on council or in the office to admit it.  Finally Ann Page, who is on the committee, said the magic words ‘’What happens to our bears is up to the CO to decide ‘’. That’s it; I do get it. When I had control, we, that’s the CO and I, would decide the fate of our bears. That’s why we were cited at bear conferences as the best-run bear group around B.C. We were bear proofing, had bear by-laws and didn’t shoot bears. The important part is gone. We have lost control of our bears in Lions Bay.

 Council seems to think we have our act together bear-wise and for that reason our C.O. Chris Doyle won’t use lethal force. Well, we spent about $11,000 on bear programs here, most of which came from the BC government. Whistler, which is only five times the size of Lions Bay, has spent millions, yes millions. They have bear aversion teams, bear biologists galore and more bear bylaws than you could possibly imagine, and our COs shoot lots of bears there.

Chris, our CO, has already set a snare here; he took it out mid December. Snares are bad for the leg of anything that gets caught in it whether it’s your dog or a bear. They must be monitored every two hours according to the book. This one wasn’t. As well, Chris knows we have a bylaw here forbidding snares.

Chris as far as COs go is a pretty good one. Still in the last bad bear in his area 45 bears were shot and the same number relocated. As well, he may well not be in charge in the area that runs from Lions Bay to Darcy in the future. He wasn’t when we started our group. His predecessor is now in the Surrey office. Half of the COs I have met are like Chris; half are, in my opinion, just young guys with guns. In fairness to the COs it must be said that the Socreads or Liberals, or whatever they call themselves, cut the Ministry Of the Environment to shreds just before we set up our group, that resulted in a huge bear kill. The COs were run off their feet.

The bear committee will try and deal with the bear problem with fines. I thought of fines fondly but avoided them. Taking the soft path is the “Lions Bay way“.

One reason the council says they changed our system here was that it was a’’ liability issue ‘’ This is totally bogus. I was on the board of Circle Craft for eight long years. Circle for those that don’t know is the largest and wealthiest Art/Craft co-op in North America. We had this guy on the board that when he didn’t like something he would say ‘’well we could be liable there’’ and the proposal would be dropped. Then we got a lawyer on the board and when this clown would bring up liability everyone would look down the table to Stephen, and he would laugh, wave his hand, and we could get on with our business.

Never at anytime was anything done here that would cause Lions Bay or myself to be liable for anything.  I would go to a call, advise the homeowner how to prevent the return of the animal and try and figure out which bear was causing the trouble. If the homeowner didn’t remove the attractant we could get them a fine. This is the job of the COS, but they weren't doing it, so we did. Our CO was advised of every important call and given a year-end review of as many of the hundreds of calls as I could write down.
I wasted 3 years of my life in Commerce /Law at UBC, I have lawyers in my family like a dog has fleas. I think I should know what liability means.

As for me leaving Lions Bay; yes I am, but that doesn’t mean our bear program would leave with me; I was training my successor.

Also council wanted to have our village declared ‘’ bear smart ‘’ The bear smart program was set up by the BC government mainly to stop the criticism it was getting for shooting thousands of bears every year. The program identifies sources of bear food and encourages the town to eliminate them. We have done everything the program asks us to do; there is no reason why we shouldn’t have bear smart status now. The problem is that bears not only eat a huge variety of plants and insect larva but they have a gland in their mouth that will tell them if something is harmful to eat. Every town has thousands of things that qualify as bear food; there is no hope of keeping them out in a bad bear year. None.

The reason the new system won’t work is there is no incentive to do the job. I did it because I was getting the desired results; that is, we haven’t killed a bear here in years, unlike everywhere else in the BC bear belt. Whoever tries to run the bear program here will find they were loosing on every front, you know why? Because the only area I was winning was keeping the guns and snares away, and now that’s gone

Lecturing to people clearly doesn’t work. Most people don’t want to listen. We tried it; we wrote twenty articles for the Seagull and other publications over the years Last year we had at least 4 outdoor freezers wrecked. Three of those belonged to old timers, who knew better. One of them belonged to a young couple with a new baby. They had many bear visits, and three visits from me. Garbage, then fridge twice, then fruit trees twice, then garbage again. Finally they got it right, took my advice, and that broke the cycle. Education the hard way is the only thing that gets results. 

I’m sorry, I know bears are scary, but really, if you don’t attract them they won’t come near you.
The system now will be; you phone the bear line, and depending on the number of calls the CO will come out and deal with the animal, mostly they get the right one, but I know of one instance where they shot the wrong bear.
So now if you call in a bear it could be shot; I wouldn’t do it. That’s the way it was in the old days

In reality, no matter what you say, no matter how you sugar-coat it, we are pretty much back to square one. The next ‘’ bad bear year ‘’will probably see Lions Bays’ bears being shot. The system can easily be changed back. You just reroute the calls back to Lions Bay. Talk to council.

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