It's a move that's allowed her to respond quickly to recent 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.“
What she's doing, at least in Glacier, 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 mama 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.“
Actually, 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.“
The problem, she said, was a lack of workable options. You could relocate problem bears, but they only came back. Or you could kill them, but they never came back.
What she needed, she said, was something in-between.
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 non-lethal methods to ”teach bears ‘no.' “
Her first efforts produced pepper spray, now used by many in Montana's outdoors, but at the time developed as an instructional tool for big bruins.
But spray only goes so far, and for a tool to be truly effective it needed a longer reach.
Soon, Hunt was partnered with Wyoming Fish and Game officials, performing the first-ever tests of rubber bullets on wild bears.
”No one knew what would happen,“ she said. Would the bears turn and run? Would they charge?
Turns out, the rubber bullets worked great, effectively stinging bears into retreat.
Her new tool, she said, was a good educator, but with just 30 yards' reach she still needed more range ”to take us safely where a rubber bullet couldn't go.“
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.
”They also were good around people,“ Hunt said. ”They have turned out to be exactly what we needed.“
Over the past decade, Hunt and her Wind River Bear Institute have worked bears using trained dogs to remarkable success.
”In 10 years of work,“ she said, ”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.“
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.
The program involves lots of learning - by the bears, the public, the bear managers and especially by the Wind River staff. She calls those players ”partners in life.“
Its success was evident enough that this summer managers at Glacier Park decided to try taking it straight into the bear's lair.
For years, a female grizzly has stomped around Oldman Lake like she owns the place. At first, she learned she didn't have to move away from the trail when hikers came by. Later, she learned hikers would give way when she wanted the trail to herself.
Finally, she learned to lumber boldly into remote backcountry campgrounds, cubs in tow, to ”Hoover up“ any crumbs left behind.
But she never stole any food, never charged, never acted in any way aggressively. And she was productive, keeping up a regular brood of cubs and bolstering the grizzly population.
Problem was, those cubs were learning all the wrong lessons.
In July, park management invited Wind River to come in and assess the situation.
It was not without precedent. Hunt started working with the park in 1997, when she and her Karelians moved 13 black bears from alongside the Camas Road.
In 1998, they pushed a grizzly off the boardwalk at Logan Pass in just five days, and the bear never had to be trapped, never caused another day's trouble. In 2000, she successfully taught a food-conditioned grizzly to steer clear of front-country camps on the park's eastern side ”and that bear never came back.“
So when she arrived in July, much of the proof already was in the pudding.
The bear she found at Oldman Lake, miles up the trail from the popular Two Medicine Valley was, in her words, ”flexible and soft and subordinate and easy around people.“
The challenge would be to keep her that way. The last thing Hunt wanted was a bear that wasn't aggressive to suddenly get jittery and see people as a problem requiring force.
”You have to think like a bear,“ she said, ”and work with the animal's attitude.“
Grizzlies, she said, live in a natural hierarchy, with dominant males at the top. To turn this mama around would mean simulating what a dominant bear would do to a subordinate. She had to become the alpha.
”Bears respect that,“ she said. ”They don't hold grudges. They totally understand the hierarchy. But this bear, up until now, all of her experience told her she was dominant.“
It helped that the grizzly was not aggressive - ”we don't work with aggressive bears. It's too high a risk for the public later on.“ And it helped that the female had cubs - ”they don't want trouble for their babies.“
Still, she said, ”it was a big change for the park, because in the past if a bear got food or became too habituated, it was dead.“
The commitment to save the grizzly, she said, ”was an incredibly proactive thing for the park to do. They pulled together all the resources they had to try to save her, to do this properly and to give her a chance.“
With two Wind River staffers, two park rangers and three Karelians, Hunt took to the woods, set up camp and waited. The idea, she said, was to act like hikers and campers - which had been closed out of the area at the height of the summer season for the work to commence.
Immediately, the dogs scented the grizzly, barking her off the trail. She took cover in the campground, and Hunt pushed her out with shouts and exploding ”cracker shells.“
Before Hunt arrived, rangers had put a radio collar on the bear, and they tracked her all the way over the ridge and into the next drainage.
”She really took off and at that point, yeah, I thought she probably was a very good candidate for conditioning,“ Hunt said.
Dressed in ”civilian“ hiking clothes, they ”did what hikers do,“ except with trained dogs and lots of shouting. Eventually, they pulled the dogs out, and relied only on shouting.
Every time the bear retreated, the stress stopped, a positive reinforcement for making a good decision.
The rubber bullets were never fired.
”I really wanted her to learn that she could just move away from people and that she wouldn't get hurt.“
Still, she said, she would have liked to get at least one good rubber bullet hit, sort of a ”spanking“ reinforcement as punishment for breaking the rules. But for two weeks, the grizzly never broke the rules.
”She learned that she had choices,“ Hunt said, ”and that it was her behavior that was causing her trouble.“
That's the problem with random and inconsistent hazing, Hunt said: Bears tend to learn that rangers are the problem, rather than their own behavior.
The work is not yet complete, she said, ”but we already know that this bear knows it shouldn't approach campgrounds. It's working, and she's starting to understand.“
As for the park, officials there are still waiting to see how things turn out.
”It's the kind of thing you can't invest in just halfway,“ said Ann Marie Chytra, head ranger in Glacier's Hudson Bay District. ”You have to be fully committed. If you're going to do it, you'd better do it right or not do it at all.“
But whether the park backs another such attempt with another such bear remains to be seen. ”Really, Chytra said, ”it depends on how this one turns out, and I don't think we know that yet.“
It is, she said, more experiment than trend.
Which is exactly what Hunt's work has always been. In recent years, she's tried to scratch up enough money to sit down and write up her findings in a peer-reviewed article for the scientific community, a document that would quantify and validate the experiment.
But she's been too busy trying to make a living, a task made all the harder by her recent relocation to Florence.
”It's a constant struggle for us to continue on,“ Hunt said, ”and yet it's the only alternative. Quite often, I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth.“
But if her work in the backcountry succeeds, she said, in 20 years her methods will be as commonplace as her pepper spray and rubber bullets are now. Should that come to pass, she said, Glacier National Park will deserve much of the credit.
”In all my work in national parks, I've never seen a park commit like this,“ she said. They've been pioneers with us. They knew that this was this bear's last chance, and they did it right.“