A black bear that spent its winter slumbering underneath a Salmon Arm mobile home was euthanized this week.
Eric Tayukodi, a BC Conservation officer, said the bear emerged on Thursday, and that once it was captured and sedated, a veterinarian did a full check-up, finding it was not in ideal condition for relocation.
“The public safety threat was low, but it would have been irresponsible to relocate the bear based on its body condition,” Tayukodi said.
He said it was clear that the bear had some sort of parasite or possibly mange.
“It was missing a lot of hair from around its face, its forearms, and its belly, and it was determined to be an older black bear, probably between the six- to eight-year age mark for a sow. And it was a dry sow, which means that it was not lactating,” Tayukodi said.
“Based upon its body condition, it was determined that if it had been relocated, chances are it would have come straight back to the same area it was taken out of. So that was ruled out as an option and the animal was humanely euthanized.”
Bears, he said, have a nose seven times more powerful than a bloodhound, which means the bear had to have already known it was slumbering under a structure that had a human living over it, and that tells Conservation officers a few things.
“A bear that’s healthy would be much more apt to hibernate in an area away from people,” he said. “Once bears start losing their fear of humans and become more habituated to humans, they lose that fear of people, and they start seeing humans and their trash as a way of getting food.
“So they started noticing that that person’s putting compost out, they can get into compost and maybe the person will yell at them but they don’t really get a negative response. Whereas in the wild when they get a food source, generally they have to fight to defend the source from other bears.”
That’s why, he said, in most cases, relocation does not work.
“In British Columbia, we have 160,000 estimated black bears, so you can’t really take a bear from one area and a town and move it to a forest service road in the middle of nowhere and say, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine, there are no bears there,'” he said.
“There are bears there. So when we have to euthanize a bear, we take it very seriously. Public safety is the No. 1 concern wherever we deal with wildlife, and even though the public safety concern was pretty low on this one, it would have been irresponsible to relocate that bear based upon its body condition.”
The bear was discovered earlier this month when a child spotted it half under a mobile home in the RV park.
“What we think happened was it was hibernating under there and it woke up, which they do occasionally during the winter,” Tayukodi said.
“It was kind of rainy, and later in the evening, it turned into kind of a sleet-snow mix. So, somehow, it woke up and it probably felt the temperature get colder and it went back to sleep.”
They believed the bear went back to its slumber for around a week before it emerged again.