Bears Don’t Care About Your Philosophy: Why Firearms Matter in Bear Country

Timothy Treadwell was a controversial figure who insisted on approaching and viewing brown bears at close range for about 13 years. He did not carry a firearm or bear spray or any deterrents. From backpacker.com:

Wes: Timothy thought he was the dominant bear in the ecosystem. I think he was past the point of accepting any input on that. I think he had convinced himself that they would never hurt him, and he was untouchable.

Treadwell was repeatedly warned about the danger. From akfatal.net:

Despite that, Treadwell refused to carry firearms or ring his campsites with an electric fence as do bear researchers in the area. And he stopped carrying bear spray for self-protection in recent years. Friends said he thought he knew the bears so well he didn’t need it.

U.S. Geological Survey bear researcher Tom Smith; Sterling Miller, formerly the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s top bear authority; and others said they tried to warn the amateur naturalist that he was being far too cavalier around North America’s largest and most powerful predator….

“I told him to be much more cautious … because every time a bear kills somebody, there is a big increase in bearanoia and bears get killed,” Miller said. “I thought that would be a way of getting to him, and his response was ‘I would be honored to end up in bear scat.’ ”

Timothy Treadwell was killed and eaten by brown bears in October 2003. His death overshadowed the first fatal failure of bear spray to stop an attack.

Vitaly Aleksandrovich Nikolayenko was a prominent Russian brown bear researcher (Asian version of the American brown or grizzly bear) who routinely and closely approached bears without a firearm. He did this for 33 years, from 1970 to December 2003. In December 2003, he followed a bear that had come out of hibernation in the winter until the bear attacked him, killed him, and ate him. His use of bear spray had failed to stop the bear.  His was the first recorded fatal failure of bear spray. The killing was the culmination of several lucky escapes over the years of his association with brown bears.

Nikolayenko had a cabin capable of keeping bears out and carried bear spray.

Both Timothy Treadwell and Nikolayenko studied brown bears. The other bear researcher whose attitude seems close to Treadwell’s is Nikita Ovsyanikov. Ovsyannikov is a well-known Russian bear researcher who studied polar bears.

Polar bears are not as aggressive as brown bears. They tend to test new prey to see if it is dangerous before attacking. Brown bears often attack without warning. As with Treadwell, Ovsyanikof refuses to carry firearms. He seems willing to die rather than shoot a polar bear. From an interview in Outsideonline.com:

I never considered having firearms. From the beginning, my philosophy was that my presence and my ambitions there in no way should result in the polar bears losing their lives.

Osyanikov had an armored cabin to live in. He carried a big stick and, later, bear spray.  Osyanikov sometimes had a dog with him. As with Treadwell, nearly all of his study is in a food rich environment where there are large numbers of bears, and the bears are used to social interplay with other bears. It is clear most bears on Wrangel Island have been conditioned to fear and avoid humans. Even when most aggressive bears catch Osyanikov’s human scent, the bears run away. Osyanikov has an attitude similar to Treadwell’s:

“Do not ever consider approaching a large predator if you feel uneasy managing a close interaction on the strength of psychological superiority alone. If you do, you risk both your own life and the life of the animal.”

Osyanikov used his stick to wack mature bears on the nose and shoulder to dominate them and keep them from attacking. He does not consider this “provoking” the bears. Osyanikov views gathering firewood at night in a village as “provoking” a bear after the bear kills and eats a woman on Wrangel Island. From the PBHIMS database, incident 230:

In November 2003, a native woman was killed by a female polar bear in the village on Wrangel Island…the woman was killed because she seriously violated all safety rules and actually provoked the bear to attack. Before the night whe[n] was killed, the woman had slept in her house all day and went out to collect wood for her stove in the late evening, in darkness. It was an autumn with an ice-free sea and many hungry polar bears were hanging around the village.(editors note, it was October 13, 2003, Osyanikov mentions both October and November)

The female bear that was hanging around the village at that time, the woman was a dark, slowly moving creature, stooping down to the ground- an image of prey. On the fourth walk the bear decided to attack. The woman was killed, and the female bear started eating the body.

In addition to dealing with polar bears, Osyanikov had the advantage of traveling by ATV. He observed bears from towers out of their reach, sometimes observed from the cabin. He had another person with him during numerous observations. Most of the bears on Wrangle Island seem to be conditioned to fear humans, possibly because of the Russian military presence on the island.

All three researchers have/had an obsession with large bears. None of them had easy access to handguns for defense against bears. Timothy Treadwell did most of his observations in National Parks before 2010 when the federal ban on firearms in parks was removed. Two of them were killed and eaten by bears. The Russians had sturdy cabins to stay in at night. They did not venture out after dark. All of them stressed it was their intimate knowledge of individual bears and the bear social structure that allowed them to approach bears so closely without being attacked.

This observer believes the fear of humans by polar bears on Wrangel Island is what primarily saved Osyanikov. In one instance, where he was certain he was going to be severely mauled or killed, once the bear caught his scent, the bear ran off.

About Dean Weingarten:

Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.