Police kill garbage-eating bear

PALMER — Police spent six hours trying to shoo a wayward bruin out of a densely populated part of the city Monday before opting to kill the animal.

“Everyone wants to give the animal the best possible chance to survive and go somewhere else but this bear wasn’t doing that,” Cmdr. Lance Ketterling said of the black bear.

The bear was first reported at around 3:30 p.m., Monday in the S. Gulkana Street area. Ketterling said that officers tried to shoo the bear away.

“They were trying to not have to shoot the bear, but throughout the course of the next six or seven hours or so the bear continued to go through people’s garbage,” he said. “It showed no fear of people.”

He said the bear moved through town, heading to N. Valley Way. It continued going through garbage and bears that learn to seek food in garbage cans, Ketterling said, can be “notoriously hard” to shoo away.

And, although N. Valley Way isn’t exactly downtown Palmer, it’s very heavily populated with apartment buildings and single-family homes.

“At that time of night you’re talking about a lot of kiddos are out and running around,” Ketterling said.

Throughout the day, officers were talking to Alaska State Troopers and to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

“Fish and Game said, ‘yeah go ahead and dispatch the bear,’” Ketterling said.

Todd Rinaldi, the area’s biologist for Fish and Game, said killing the bear before the situation got too dangerous was the right call.

“It was a young bear, it probably wasn’t going to move off,” he said. “They’re really quick to develop what we would term ‘inappropriate habits’ or maybe ‘incompatible feeding habits’ is a better term.”

Ketterling said that police officers decided to use shotguns to put the bear down rather than the rifles and handguns they also have in their arsenal.

“Generally for this sort of thing a shotgun is the most appropriate and humane thing to use,” Ketterling said.

He said that in 17 years in Palmer bears are a fairly uncommon issue for police. He said he could remember four incidences in that time, all of them with black bears. One was by the Alaska State Fairgrounds, another run over on a city street.

Aside from Monday’s bear, in Ketterling’s experience, “we haven’t had to dispatch one except for the one that was hit on the road.”

Rinaldi said he would have to “dig pretty far back” in the records to find the last time a bear had to be put down in city limits of Palmer.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game used the incident as a learning opportunity, putting out a press release Thursday with tips for how to keep from attracting bears.

“We just don’t want to have any attractants available in these neighborhoods to reward them for their curious behavior,” Rinaldi said.

The department’s list of tips includes:

• Storing garbage inside or in bear proof containers until trash pick-up day

• Using electric fences to keep bears away from gardens and livestock

• Cleaning barbecue grills — especially their grease traps — after each use

• Feeding pets indoors or cleaning up spilled food and keeping feed indoors

• Taking bird feeders down from April to October

• Keeping freezers locked in secured buildings

• Planting gardens in the open way from game trails

• Only composting vegetable matter and turning compost over frequently.

Though the bear did find birdseed in its run through the city, Rinaldi emphasized the trash issue.

“I see a lot of people with perfectly good garages have trash cans sitting out in front of their houses,” he said. “That was the case here. It wasn’t trash days in these neighborhoods but still trash cans were sitting out in front of people’s houses.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.