Sunday’s fatal bear attack near Mackenzie that claimed the life of a 27-year old man, while obviously tragic, is an extremely rare occurrence.
That from Sgt. Len Butler, a longtime conservation officer in the Williams Lake area.
We asked Butler to put into perspective how unlikely an attack like this is…
“We take in approximately 25,000 black bear-human wildlife conflicts to our RAPP line every year and those are just conflicts.”
“It could be from right from the garbage situation to injuries and our population of black bears I can’t even estimate.”
“I think we’re doing fairly well.”
Butler says most of those years there are zero fatalities.
He says that normally only happens once every 5 or 6 years and that’s throughout the entire province.
Butler says the last wildlife fatality he can remember in our area was when a cougar killed a man in the Tatla Lake area back in the mid-’90s.
As for avoiding conflict with bears when camping, he says it’s the same old message that has been sent for many, many years and that’s to make sure that you store your food in a separate location from where you are sleeping.
Butler says basically a bear’s stomach rules and they will go anywhere that they can smell food.
(Files from George Henderson)