Sometime this year, take a moment to say “happy birthday” to the National Parks Service. It’s turning 100 years old in August. And my, how some things have changed in that century.
Take, for example, how the parks deal with bears.
Today, the Park Service characterizes the possibility of seeing live bears as a very special but far from guaranteed experience. It reminds park visitors to follow “bear etiquette.”
Respect a bear’s space.
Never approach, crowd, pursue or displace bears.
Let bears eat natural foods.
It was not always so. In the early 20th century, according to Rachel Mazur’s book “Speaking of Bears,” bear-feeding spectacles were major attractions.
In Sequoia National Park, managers noticed that bears foraged nightly at a garbage dump inside the park. So they moved the trash pit to a more central location at set up bleachers for hundreds of visitors, separated from the bears by only a short barrier.
Visitors to Yosemite National Park could see bears eat on a platform that was illuminated by floodlights at night. Several other parks also had bear pits, Mazur wrote, and future President Gerald Ford worked for a time as an armed guard on a bear-feeding truck at Yellowstone National Park. By the 1930s, calls to stop feeding the bears grew as the trash-nourished population swelled and more human-bear run-ins occurred. But it would take decades — and many killings of “nuisance bears” — for the Park Service to arrive at its current view that it is best to stay out of bears’ way and lock human food in bear-proof containers.
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