Woman keeps grizzlies away to keep them alive

WEST GLACIER, Mont. – Carrie Hunt leaves the horse-whispering to other, more prosaic folk. It’s far more exciting and satisfying, she said, to practice bear-shouting.

“Basically, what I’ve done over the past 10 years is pilot a program where we teach bears and teach people how to live in the same areas without conflict,” she said.

Her business, the Wind River Bear Institute, recently moved from Utah to Florence, Mont., putting Hunt within a day’s drive of the lower 48’s last remaining grizzly bear populations. It’s a move that’s allowed her to respond quickly to bear problems, including grain spills in the railroad corridor near Essex.

And now that she’s in the neighborhood, Hunt and her methods are expanding out of people’s backyards and into the backcountry, with precedent-setting work deep in Glacier National Park.

“What we’re doing now has never been done before,” Hunt said. “What we’re doing is the only program of its kind in the entire world.”

Hunt is traveling like a missionary into grizzly country, bringing with her lessons for the bears in how to get along with human hikers. This summer, students included a sow and two cubs – bears that, until Hunt’s lessons, didn’t mind much hanging out with humans.

“The goal,” she said, “was to teach the bears to prefer to do the right thing.”

The real goal, which goes back decades, has been to stop killing bears.

“I’ve been a bear biologist for almost 30 years now,” Hunt said. “Pretty early on, I got tired of seeing bears die because they got into trouble with humans.”

In 1982, after years working in Yellowstone National Park and along Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, Hunt finally decided to tackle the problem. She had moved to Missoula and was working on her master’s degree, when she started thinking about nonlethal methods to “teach bears ‘no.’ “

Her first efforts included the use of pepper spray. But spray only goes so far, and for a tool to be truly effective it needed a longer reach.

Soon, Hunt began working with Wyoming Fish and Game officials, performing tests of rubber bullets on wild bears.

“No one knew what would happen,” she said. Would the bears turn and run? Would they charge?

The rubber bullets worked great, effectively stinging bears into retreat. But they too were limited in range.

Her work, of course, had taken her into hunting camps and across big ranches, where she started to notice a pattern. Outfitters and landowners with dogs didn’t have near the bear problems as those without.

Dogs, she realized, would give her the required range, “and I went looking for the breed. It was then that I discovered Karelian bear dogs.”

Brown bear hunters in Finland swore by their Karelians, which unlike hounds wouldn’t tree a bear. Instead, they worked grizzlies the way cow dogs work cattle.

During the past decade, Hunt and her Wind River Bear Institute have worked bears using trained dogs to remarkable success.

“In 10 years of work, with 200 to 300 bear actions a year, working from Japan to Canada and throughout the Rockies, we have never had a bear dog hurt or a person hurt or a bear hurt,” she said.

The trick, she said, is to distinguish between “aversive conditioning” and “bear shepherding.”

Aversive conditioning, she said, uses negative reinforcement to harass bears away from people places – essentially to teach fear of people.

Bear shepherding, she said, involves sophisticated bear behavior modification, “cuing them in very precise ways.” Essentially, it teaches good habits, teaches a bear it can leave at any time and it can choose natural cover over garbage cans.