Ilves ja muut suurpedot

Mielestäni etälamautin voitaisiin sallia siihen erikoisluvan luvan hakeneille – silloin kun suupedot pyrkivät pihapiiriin tai kotieläinten kimppuun. Sätkyn saanut yksilö ei enää toiste etsiydy samaan paikkaan.

Kopioin tähän aiheesta kertovan tarinan Facebook-sivulta Lonely Camp. Sellainenkin ihmekapistus on tarinassa mukana kuin perunapyssy (potato gun). Youtuben mukaan potaattipyssyjen käyttö aiheuttaa paljon onnettomuuksia, että ehkäpä järeä kuulapyssy on parempi (kiväärimalli).

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At a salmon hatchery on Baranof Island in Southeast Alaska, wildlife managers once shot a brown bear with a giant potato gun. The bear got hit, turned around to see what struck it, found the potato on the ground, picked it up, and ate it. They were now technically feeding a bear.

Port Armstrong Hatchery sits at the southern tip of Baranof Island and produces more than 100 million salmon a year, mostly pink and chum. When the fish crowd the mouth of the short stream below the facility every summer, brown bears show up by the dozen. Hatchery manager Ben Contag once counted 36 individual bears during his two-minute walk to work. Bears on the beach and in the creek are fine. Bears on the boardwalk and inside the work areas are not.

Over the years, staff tried everything. Electric fences. Whistles. Seal bombs. Cracker shells. Pepper spray. The potato gun. Yelling and screaming. They tried replacing the potato with a quarter-pound slug of modeling clay. The bears took the hit and stood there. Nothing worked well enough to keep a determined brown bear off a boardwalk that smelled like a hundred million salmon.

In 2010, ADF&G biologist Phil Mooney proposed something different. He brought in conducted electrical weapons, the devices most people know by the brand name Taser, and started a systematic aversive conditioning program. The rules were simple. Bears could eat fish on the beach, in the creek, anywhere in the natural environment. But the moment a bear stepped onto the boardwalk or into the work area, it got tasered and yelled at. Immediately. Every time.

The results were unlike anything the hatchery had seen. A tasered bear goes down for a few seconds, gets up, and runs. No bear has ever stood and taken a second shot. Mooney and his colleagues, primarily Larry Lewis and Neil Barten, have now tasered more than 325 brown bears at Port Armstrong with a 100 percent flight response. One sow that was hit left her cubs, walked 40 to 50 yards away, sat down, and called the cubs to her. After that, a person yelling was enough to keep her off the boardwalk for the rest of the season. She remembered.

The reason it works is hierarchy. Brown bears are intensely aware of social rank. They read posture, size, and aggression constantly. A bear that is knocked down while a human stands over it yelling processes the encounter the same way it would process being knocked down by a bigger bear. Mooney understood this and used it deliberately. By tasering bears, the biologists became the dominant bear on the beach.

Then they found something stranger. They recorded the audio of a large male bear roaring after being tasered and played it back on a speaker. The bears on the tide flat fled. They had not been tasered. They had not even seen a human. They heard the sound of a big bear in trouble and decided that whatever was happening over there was not worth investigating. Mooney cleared an entire tide flat of bears by pressing play.

Paintballs added a second layer. Shooting a bear with a paintball marks it with a visible color spot that lets hatchery workers identify individuals from a distance in dim light when most bears look identical. It also stings enough to count as a low-level hazing action. Mooney has paintballed more than 100 bears. Between the paint and the Tasers, the team can track which bears have been conditioned, which are new arrivals, and which are testing the boundaries again.

The alternative to all of this is shooting bears dead under Alaska’s Defense of Life and Property rules, which the hatchery has had to do in the past as a last resort. Contag and his staff did not want to kill bears. They had been trying not to kill bears for years. What they needed was something that made a brown bear genuinely not want to come back, and everything they tried before the Taser failed because a brown bear can take a hit from almost anything and decide it was worth the trouble. A Taser is the first tool Mooney has used where the bear disagrees.

Source: Alaska Department of Fish and Game, ”Hazing Brown Bears at Port Armstrong” / Alaska Fish and Wildlife News (2016) / Fairbanks Daily News-Miner / American Hunter.