BC Conservation euthanizes Salmon Arm mobile home park bear | 24CA News
A black bear that spent its winter slumbering beneath a Salmon Arm cellular dwelling was euthanized this week.
Eric Tayukodi, a BC Conservation officer, stated the bear emerged on Thursday, and that after it was captured and sedated, a veterinarian did a full check-up, discovering it was not in superb situation for relocation.
“The public safety threat was low, but it would have been irresponsible to relocate the bear based on its body condition,” Tayukodi stated.
He stated it was clear that the bear had some type of parasite or presumably mange.
“It was missing a lot of hair from around its face, its forearms, and its belly, and it was determined to be an older black bear, probably between the six- to eight-year age mark for a sow. And it was a dry sow, which means that it was not lactating,” Tayukodi stated.
“Based upon its body condition, it was determined that if it had been relocated, chances are it would have come straight back to the same area it was taken out of. So that was ruled out as an option and the animal was humanely euthanized.”
Bears, he stated, have a nostril seven occasions extra highly effective than a bloodhound, which suggests the bear needed to have already recognized it was slumbering below a construction that had a human residing over it, and that tells Conservation officers a couple of issues.
“A bear that’s healthy would be much more apt to hibernate in an area away from people,” he stated. “Once bears begin dropping their worry of people and change into extra habituated to people, they lose that worry of individuals, they usually begin seeing people and their trash as a method of getting meals.
“So they started noticing that that person’s putting compost out, they can get into compost and maybe the person will yell at them but they don’t really get a negative response. Whereas in the wild when they get a food source, generally they have to fight to defend the source from other bears.”
That’s why, he stated, usually, relocation doesn’t work.
“In British Columbia, we have 160,000 estimated black bears, so you can’t really take a bear from one area and a town and move it to a forest service road in the middle of nowhere and say, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine, there are no bears there,’” he stated.
“There are bears there. So when we have to euthanize a bear, we take it very seriously. Public safety is the No. 1 concern wherever we deal with wildlife, and even though the public safety concern was pretty low on this one, it would have been irresponsible to relocate that bear based upon its body condition.”
The bear was found earlier this month when a baby noticed it half below a cellular dwelling within the RV park.
“What we think happened was it was hibernating under there and it woke up, which they do occasionally during the winter,” Tayukodi stated.
“It was kind of rainy, and later in the evening, it turned into kind of a sleet-snow mix. So, somehow, it woke up and it probably felt the temperature get colder and it went back to sleep.”
They believed the bear went again to its slumber for round per week earlier than it emerged once more.
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