A lack of food resources in Alaska this summer means that bear conflicts might be more likely. And a study published June 22 in the Journal of Wildlife Management suggests that having a dog could more than double that chance. According to experts, there are precautions people can take to protect themselves and their dogs.
Tom Smith, the study’s lead author and a research wildlife biologist at Brigham Young University in Utah, has spent more than thirty years studying bears, and several of those in Kodiak.
“In Kodiak, it’s bear country right out the back door," he said.
Smith remembered the moment he decided to start this study. It was fall 2023; a couple, both experienced backcountry campers, and their dog had been fatally mauled by a bear inside their tent in Canada’s Banff National Park. Press and park staff both came to him for advice.
“The takeaway was they did everything right, yet they got fatally mauled," he said. "But as a bear biologist, I know that’s not the message. And I said, I would never take a dog in bear country. Period.”
Smith explained that dogs and bears are natural enemies. Bears evolved from the ancestors of wolves around fifty million years ago, but there are still a lot of similarities between the two. Wolves and bears compete for food and territory, and have been known to kill each other’s young.
“There’s not been a lot of love lost between those two species," Smith said. "So now when you take a mutated wolf, which we call a domestic dog, and put it on a rope, what do you expect?”
Older research had suggested that dogs could be helpful in bear country because they alert owners to the presence of bears and protect their owners in the event of an attack. But other research and anecdotal evidence from wildlife managers suggested that bear conflicts were more likely when a dog was present. Smith wanted to see if this was true.
He and another of the study’s authors have spent decades sorting through news stories and reports from thousands of black, brown, and polar bear encounters across the United States and Canada. People who have peaceful encounters with bears don’t usually report them, so Smith could only analyze data from conflict encounters. But he was able to compare bear conflicts that happened to people with dogs and people without.
Smith found that in 326 conflicts, people with dogs were more than twice as likely to have a negative encounter, and that dogs initiated the conflict with the bear 54% of the time. Off-leash dogs were six times more likely to cause problems than leashed dogs. Dogs alerted their owners to the presence of a bear less than 10% of the time, and did not come to their owner’s defense in more than a third of cases.
“That’s kind of what we’ve been telling people for years around here with bears," said Larry Van Daele, a retired wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and current executive director at the Kodiak Brown Bear Trust.
Van Daele said that for the most part, coastal brown bears in Kodiak and other parts of Alaska are less likely to be aggressive towards people and pets than their grizzly bear cousins in the lower 48, partly due to Alaska's abundance of resources.
“Grizzly bears have to work a lot harder for their food than brown bears do," he said. "Brown bears have big berry patches, they have places to graze the grass, they have a lot of salmon coming in, and so forth.”
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been bear incidents: a woman and her dog fended off a black bear in Cooper Landing just last month. In fact, Van Daele said it’s a good idea to be on higher alert around bears this year. The unusually long and cold winter gave berry bushes in Kodiak and the rest of Alaska a late start, so Van Daele said there will be a smaller crop this year. And local salmon runs haven’t been very strong so far.
“If they’re kept out of the dump, and don’t have the berry patches, and if we don’t have a good salmon run on the Buskin or Pillar they could become a little bit more grouchy," he said. "And this whole idea of dogs could be a much more important aspect to think about than in normal years.”
Fern Bendio, a research assistant at Brigham Young University and a co-author on the study, said not taking dogs into bear country is the best way to avoid problems. But if that isn’t an option–like in Kodiak–then you can lower your chances of an attack by keeping your dog on a leash.
“There’s a really specific sequence of events where the dog would be off leash, it’s running ahead on the trail, and then it runs into a bear," she said. "And it gets scared, and what does your dog do when it gets scared? It runs right back to the owner, to a safety person.”
Bendio also suggested that people have bear spray on hand anytime they go hiking, and even when they let their dog out into the yard. The study found that bear spray was effective in nearly 70% of cases.
Lead author Smith said that their study is by no means the full story; he’d love to do a survey that includes responses from people who had peaceful encounters with bears too. But he hopes studies like his help keep people safe in bear country.
"The message isn't 'never take your dog out,'" he said. "But there are a few things you can do to make it less likely that you're going to have a bear problem."
