The bears were thoughtlessly betrayed. Increasing numbers of visitors
produced large garbage-piles. People came to the garbage-piles to watch
the bears feed and often teased them. The bears became cross. Sometimes
there were fights among the assembled bears over the smelly feasts. The
charity of the garbage-pile led them into bad habits, upset their
digestions, and ruined their dispositions. But their appetite for
garbage increased until they became food pensioners and garbage
drunkards. Like some humans they enjoy being pensioners and insist on
being supplied. If there wasn't enough garbage they raided camps and
hotels. If their raid was interrupted they resented it. In due time a
few of the most dyspeptic bears became bold and defiant raiders.
The Park is visited by thousands for whom the bears should be a source
of relaxation and furnish new interests and enjoyment. But the bears are
becoming unhealthy and are a menace to people. Now and then some
official tries to cure the bear trouble by having a number of bears
roped, tied, and whipped. Occasionally a bear is shot. There are those
who advocate that the guides and officials of the Park carry guns; and
still others are advocating the extermination of the grizzly. We need
the grizzly. Most cures proposed are worse than his trouble. But there
is a prevention in simply no garbage-piles.
In the Glacier National Park, which has been a wild-life reservation
only since 1910, the grizzlies have not yet become demoralized by
garbage. The grizzly bear situation in the Yellowstone is a serious and
even an alarming one, and what exists here is certain to develop in
other Parks. The demoralizing factors are likely to be expanded and not
diminished. Then, too, in the Yellowstone this continuous eating of
garbage may ere long bring on a pestilence among the grizzlies, or
possibly put a check on the number of cubs born. The whole situation
appears to be embraced in what I have previously said about what a
grizzly is fed and how.
The grizzly has not lost all his old instincts in the Park. Around the
garbage-piles he is a lazy, cross pensioner. But away from them, and
especially where he ranges outside of the Park, the same bear is as
alert and as energetic as ever in getting a living and watching out for
his safety. They are tame near garbage-piles but a short distance away
are wild. They are comparatively easy to trap near the garbage-piles,
where they will enter a trap-door; but the same bear outside the Park is
extremely wary and avoids going near a trap. Says William H. Wright, in
"The Grizzly Bear":--