Rachel Brown
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A state Department of Natural Resources manager said the department likely could have avoided euthanizing three bears that apparently decided to make their home in downtown Chatsworth if people had avoided feeding the animals.
Northwest Georgia Game Management Supervisor Chuck Waters said DNR officials put down a mamma bear and two cubs that had been sited numerous times downtown since Sept. 24. They are not reported to have harmed anyone, but the bears had apparently become so comfortable around people that several residents said they were destroying property, rummaging through garbage cans and roaming around schools, neighborhoods and high-traffic areas.
Waters said at least one of the bears had a tag showing it had previously been in Big Canoe and relocated to the Cohutta Wilderness near the Tennessee state line after causing problems in that north Georgia town. He said the bears traveled from the place they were relocated, apparently because they had grown used to eating food left by humans in places they could easily access it. Their failure to stay in the wilderness after being relocated was a major factor in putting them down rather than locating them somewhere else, he said.
“Heck, I don’t like it either,” Waters said. “It’s not something we look forward to doing, and thank goodness we don’t have to do it very often. But in a situation where ... we’re looking after public safety as well, and we take a bear we’ve already tried to relocate and it doesn’t take ... it’s just not prudent to turn a bear like that loose. We hate to have to make those kinds of judgments, but what else should we have done? There’s just not many options when you get to that point.”
Chatsworth resident Mark Leonard said he wishes officials had been more persistent in their efforts to run the bears out of town rather than resorting to killing them.
“You make it hurt hard enough ... When my daddy spanked me really hard, I got the message,” Leonard said. “Animals are the same, but of course if their coat is thick it’s hard to penetrate it.”
The bears had been in the area of Seventh Avenue since about 1 p.m. Wednesday. Before then, they had been spotted at various spots around town since Sept. 24, including the recreation department, Chatsworth Elementary School, Fort Street and Sixth Avenue.
Chatsworth Police Chief Terry Martin said his office shot the bears with rubber ammunition when they first appeared, at the suggestion of DNR officials, but officers weren’t able to scare them enough to keep them out of town. He said someone called police Wednesday to tell them where the bears were, and police then contacted the DNR. Martin said he and two DNR officers responded with tranquilizer guns.
He said they had to wait a couple of hours for the bears to come down from a high tree before they could tranquilize them, then they had to safely surround them and tranquilize them one at a time before they could capture them.
“When those bears left the city of Chatsworth, they were all three still alive,” Martin said. “All I asked them guys (with the DNR) to do was just to help me get the bears out. I was afraid some kid or someone was going to get hurt very badly.”
Martin said DNR officials had the right to decide what to do with the bears. Yet he wasn’t happy about the decision.
“I didn’t want them killed either. I wanted them just moved out of town,” Martin said. “If that’s what I wanted to do, I would have killed them a week ago.”
He said one of the bears had a tag in its ear, and the other two had holes in their ears where they had been tagged before. Waters said the decision to euthanize the bears wasn’t made until later in the evening.
Waters said people should be extra vigilant about not putting out any kind of food — cat food, dog food, people food, even bird feed — when there are problems with bears coming around because the presence of food will attract them. Over time, bears grow less afraid of being around people and can become a danger, he said. Black bears are not normally aggressive, but they’re big and strong with sharp claws and teeth, he said, and they can damage property and hurt people by exhibiting normal behavior if they don’t remain in the wild.
Several residents have questioned the decision to put the bears down, saying like Leonard that they wished DNR officials had reacted differently. The euthanizations came shortly before Chatsworth’s annual Black Bear Festival Oct. 20-21. Waters responded to several questions about why the DNR officials handled the situation the way they did:
• Why not just run them off?
Waters said DNR officials and local police at their direction tried to scare the bears with sirens, by shooting them with rubber bullets and by hollering at them for several days. Martin said police received four or five calls a night from people who had spotted them in the town.
He said one person chased the bears for 30 minutes to get them out of town and shot them with the rubber buckshot. He succeeded in getting them away from the populated area, but the bear was back in the same spot an hour later, Waters said.
He said DNR officials asked everyone from the beginning to take inside their pet food, bird food and access to any human food or scraps so the bears would leave the area to look elsewhere for food.
Still, they stayed.
“The first approach is to ask folks to minimize the attractions. In the vast majority of the cases, that works,” Waters said. “In this case, (there are) a lot of acorns in the forest right now this time of year ... It makes you wonder if she wasn’t fed on purpose at some point in her life early on. Like the cubs, that’s all they knew.”
• Why didn’t you tranquilize them sooner?
Tranquilizing isn’t as easy as it looks, Waters said. He said he was called out to a bear siting in downtown Rome a couple of months ago and some of the officers there asked him to dart the animal.
Waters objected because he was concerned about the bear running into traffic and causing a wreck while it was still in a drunken-like state and not completely sedated. He also said many bears return to the wild when people back away and leave them alone. That one did.
Another problem tranquilization poses is the possibility of the bear wandering off into the woods during that period between being sedated and having the dart hit it. An unsuspecting person could unwittingly eat the poisoned bear meat if they harvested the animal, he said. Waters said there’s also a possibility of leaving behind an unused, controlled substance if an officer fires a dart gun, misses with it and can’t locate the dart. Then too, tranquilizations are expensive and impractical as a first resort, he said.
• If you were going to euthanize them, why did you allow them to roam around Chatsworth for more than a week before doing it?
Waters said DNR officials initially hoped a concerted community effort to bring in all the food and run off the bears would encourage them to move back into the wild.
Not until they caught the bears and discovered they had already been unsuccessfully relocated — and that they were relatively unafraid of people — did officials decide to euthanize them, Waters said. He said he made the decision based on DNR policy and in consultation with a state biologist who specializes in bears.
• Why were they released at first into the Cohutta Wilderness where the bear population is already thick instead of into another location in Georgia where the mother bear might be less likely to want to get her cubs away from other bears?
Waters said bears that are captured and released are frequently taken to Cohutta because it’s a “big chunk of country without many people.” He said there aren’t many similar places in northwest Georgia, and the department doesn’t have the time or resources to locate bears all over the state. Officials also try not to intentionally mix bear populations from different areas, he said.
Waters said DNR officials try in general to minimize the number of instances in which they relocate bears.
“People see bears, bears come through yards all the time in Georgia, and it just doesn’t make good sense to move every bear that somebody sees or that gets into a garbage can,” he said. “There’s not enough staff in the state, nor is it the right thing to do. You end up basically having a shell game.”
• Why not place them in a wildlife sanctuary or a zoo?
Most zoos and wildlife sanctuaries stay at capacity, and it’s difficult to get those facilities to take on more animals, Waters said.
“Bears are common enough that any zoo that wants a bear already has one,” he said.
Waters said officials were able to place a couple of very young cubs once, but even that took some doing. The cubs had been orphaned after their mother was killed by a resident.
“It took weeks to find a home for them, and one zoo begrudgingly took them,” he said. “They weren’t tamed really at that point, and they were really little and weren’t in a nuisance situation like these were.”
• Why not let them just remain in Chatsworth since they hadn’t attacked anyone?
“That’s a potential situation where a kid or somebody who doesn’t know any better messes with the cubs,” Waters said, relating several potentially hazardous situations. “You can imagine the various scenarios that could play out with a bear that’s not afraid of people. She wasn’t acting particularly aggressive, but a sow with cubs that’s not afraid of people is not a particularly good thing.”
Waters dubbed the decision “a lose-lose” situation. Putting a bear down is never a first choice, he said, but bears that can’t be scared off and that won’t be relocated are among those officials decide to put down. He said he explained that to a woman who called concerned about the welfare of the bears.
“Well, how would you have felt had we moved the bear and it came back and somebody got hurt?” he said he told her. The caller, he said, understood.
