1 homme tué par une ourse + 2 blessés

[Animal 0]

Bear trapped after Ontario woman, 2 others mauled in Yellowstone
Published On Thu Jul 29 2010
A Montana Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks employee monitors a trap near where a man was killed by a bear and two others mauled in the Soda Butte campground in Cooke City, Mont. (July 28, 2010)

DAVID GRUBBS/THE CANADIAN PRESS



Matthew Brown
The Associated Press COOKE CITY, MONT.—A mother grizzly and two of her three cubs have been captured after killing one person and injuring two others during a late-night rampage through a campground near Yellowstone National Park.

The mother, estimated to weigh 136 to 180 kilograms, was lured into a trap fashioned from culvert pipe Wednesday evening, then left in place to attract the year-old offspring. By Thursday morning, two of the younger bears had been caught and the third could be heard nearby, calling out to its mother.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard said he was confident they had captured the killer bear because it came back to the same site where the man was killed early Wednesday.

Sheppard described the rampage — in which campers in three different tents were mauled as they slept — as a highly unusual predatory attack.

“She basically targeted the three people and went after them,” Sheppard said. “It wasn’t like an archery hunter who gets between a sow and her cubs and she responds to protect them.”

Officials have said the sow will be killed. State and federal wildlife officials will determine the fate of the cubs. Sheppard said they are unlikely to be returned to the wild because they could have been learning predatory behaviour from their mother.

One of the victims of the attack, Deb Freele of London, Ontario, said Thursday she was bitten on her arm and leg before she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone.

Appearing on network morning shows from a Wyoming hospital, Freele said she woke up just before the bear bit her arm.

“I screamed, he bit harder, I screamed harder, he continued to bite,” she said, adding that she could hear her bones breaking. “I told myself, play dead,” she said. “I went totally limp. As soon as I went limp, I could feel his jaws get loose and then he let me go.”

Freele said the bear was silent.

“This, to me, was just an absolutely freaky thing,” she said. “I have to believe that the bear was not normal. It was very quiet, it never made any noise. I felt like it was hunting me.”

Freele suffered severe lacerations and crushed bones from bites on her arms. The male survivor, thought to be a teenager, suffered puncture wounds on his calf.

The names and ages of the male victims have not been released.

The bear attack was the most brazen in the Yellowstone area since the 1980s, wildlife officials said.

In 2008 at the same campground, a grizzly bear bit and injured a man sleeping in a tent. A young adult female grizzly was captured in a trap four days later and taken to a bear research centre in Washington state.

The latest attack had residents and visitors to Cooke City on edge. Many were carrying bear spray, a pepper-based deterrent more commonly seen in Yellowstone’s backcountry than on the streets of the national park satellite community.

“The suspicion among a lot of the residents is that the bear they caught (in 2008) was not the right one,” said Gary Vincelette, who has a cabin in nearby Silver Gate.

Sheppard, the warden captain, said there was no truth to that.

The grizzly involved in the latest attack showed no outward signs of sickness or starvation that might have explained its unusual behaviour, said Fish Wildlife and Parks spokeswoman Andrea Jones.

About 600 grizzly bears and hundreds of less-aggressive black bears live in the Yellowstone area.

The region is pasted with hundreds of signs warning visitors to keep food out of the bears’ reach. Experts say bears who eat human food quickly become habituated to people, increasing the danger of an attack.

Yet in the case of the Wednesday’s attack, all the victims had put their food into metal food canisters installed at campsite, Sheppard said.

“They were doing things right,” he said. “It was random. I have no idea why this bear picked these three tents out of all the tents there.”

The 10-acre (4-hectare) campground in Gallatin National Forest has 27 sites.

Two other campgrounds were also closed while the attacking bear or bears remained at large.

Thestar.com

[Animal 0]

Lifetime zoo sentence for cubs of grizzly that mauled Ont. woman in Montana




By Laura Zuckerman, Reuters July 30, 2010






By Laura Zuckerman

SALMON, Idaho — A mother grizzly bear responsible for killing a camper and
injuring two others near Yellowstone National Park was euthanized on Friday and
her three cubs will be sent to a zoo, Montana wildlife officials said.
DNA analysis of bear hair, saliva and tissue samples collected by investigators
confirmed that the 300- to 400-pound mother bruin captured with two of her cubs
after Wednesday's attacks was the killer grizzly, officials said.
The grizzly's third cub was trapped separately after the first two yearlings and
their mother. The three younger bears each weigh 100 to 150 pounds.
A lethal injection was administered to the 10-year-old mother grizzly with a
"jab stick," essentially a long pole with a syringe attached to the end, said a
spokesman for the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department.
News that the bear had been euthanized stirred outrage from animal lovers.The Montana governor's office, the state wildlife agency and various offices of
the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service were bombarded with emailed
protests, some of them threatening in nature.
"You will pay for murdering that poor grizzly mother," said one angry e-mail
message read to Reuters by a Montana wildlife official.
The mother grizzly killed one man and injured another man and a woman in three
separate predawn attacks at the popular Soda Butte campground in the Gallatin
National Forest, which is on Yellowstone's northern fringe near Bozeman,
Montana.
The attacks puzzled wildlife experts because there were no indications the bear
was provoked and no human food in the campground to entice her. Such unprovoked
bear attacks, especially fatal ones, are very rare.
Even before completion of DNA tests, wildlife authorities were virtually certain
that they had caught the right bear.
Tents were erected at the campgrounds as they had appeared the night of the
attacks, and the mother grizzly returned to the site and destroyed them again.
A bear tooth fragment found at the site matched a chipped tooth on the adult
bear that was captured, and tent or sleeping bag fibers were found in the
animal's droppings.
The coroner's report suggested that the dead camper, identified as Kevin Kammer,
48, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was dragged 25 feet from the tent where he had
been sleeping when attacked.
The woman, Deb Freele, 58, from Ontario, described a harrowing few seconds after
she awoke in a tent to find the bear chewing on her arm. She survived by playing
dead until the animal gave up and lumbered away. The third victim, who suffered
minor injuries, was identified as Ronald Singer, 21, of Alamosa, Colorado.
Under guidelines established in an agreement among eight state and federal
agencies, grizzly bears that display unprovoked, aggressive behavior or injure a
person must be removed from the population, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks
Department said.
U.S. government scientists documented six human encounters with grizzlies that
caused injury last year in the greater Yellowstone region.
The last fatal bear attack in Montana was in 2001, when a grizzly mauled and
killed a hunter who was dressing out an elk, wildlife and parks spokesman Ron
Aasheim said.
An elderly hiker was killed by a grizzly in northwestern Wyoming earlier this
month, in what was said to be the first such fatal mauling in that area in 25
years.
Millions of visitors venture each year to the greater Yellowstone region,
consisting of eastern Idaho, southern Montana and northeastern Wyoming -- home
to an estimated 550 grizzlies. The grizzly is listed as a threatened species in
the lower 48 states.


Else Poulsen
Behavioral & Environmental Solutions
905 309-1370

Advancing Bear Care 2011, CoChair
The Bear Care Group, President
www.bearcaregroup.org