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Conservation Solutions Where People and Wildlife Meet: Teaching Karelian Bear Dogs New Tricks
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Encounters with grizzlies like this one can be dangerous for people and bears. WWF employs Karelian bear dogs to reduce these conflicts.
photo: WWF-Canon / Klein & Hubert
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As travel increases to outdoor tourist destinations like our national parks, bear-human conflict is a growing problem -- both for people and for bears. Usually averse to human contact, grizzly and black bears have become accustomed -- or habituated -- to human presence, and often take advantage of feeding opportunities presented in the form of garbage at campsites. Dangerous encounters with people often lead to the relocation or destruction of "problem" bears.
Since 1999, WWF has funded an innovative program called "Partners in Life" in which Karelian bear dogs -- bred in Finland and Russia to be aggressive toward bears, originally for hunting purposes -- are trained to noisily but harmlessly chase both grizzly and black bears away from areas of high use by people. This discourages the bears from risky, close encounters, maladaptive habituation to humans, and reliance on human food sources.
If Karelians can deter bears from contact that may be dangerous to humans and themselves, the number of so-called "problem" bears that must be relocated or destroyed each year by wildlife managers should diminish. Of the 60 bears (including 19 grizzlies) conditioned in 1998, the majority were successfully "turned around" and are no longer considered a significant threat. Additionally, none of the female grizzlies the program has worked with had to be moved or killed.
The program, which has focused on Glacier and Yosemite National Parks, recently has expanded into three national parks in Alberta, Canada, where over 30 park wardens have been trained to use Karelians for aversive conditioning of bears.
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