were injured on Thursday<\/a> when the bear emerged from the forest near 4 Mile, a Nuxalk community near the town Bella Coola and attacked a school group on a lunch break alongside a walking trail.<\/p>\nThree teachers fought the bear off: one emptied two cans of bear spray that appeared to have little effect, another jumped on the bear, pummeling it with punches. A third hit the grizzly repeatedly with her crutches before it finally fled back into the woods.<\/p>\n
Three children were taken to a hospital following the incident, including two with critical injuries. An adult was also flown to a hospital in Vancouver. Seven others were treated in the community.<\/p>\n
The province\u2019s environment minister, Tamara Davidson, said the teachers \u201ctook great risk\u201d when they intervened to protect children. \u201cThey were well prepared, and they were the true heroes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conservation officers say that given the size of the group, the attack was largely unprecedented in the region. But it has sent ripples of worry throughout 4 Mile, and put the outdoors-oriented residents on lockdown as officers search for the aggressive bear.<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, the province\u2019s conservation service said it had scoured a large, cordoned-off area of the Bella Coola River valley for the female bear and her two cubs, but the rocky and densely forested landscape has offered up few clues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is, speaking from experience, probably the most dangerous thing that conservation officers do, especially dealing with family units with sows,\u201d Sgt Jeff Tyre of the Conservation Officer Service, or COS, at a news conference Sunday.<\/p>\n
If possible, teams will live-trap bears and collect DNA samples to identify the likely attackers. But, as Tyre said: \u201cThe bears don\u2019t necessarily cooperate.\u201d<\/p>\n
The teams, working amid in freezing temperatures and under threat of snow, are also racing against the biological clocks of bears, who will soon begin hibernating as the deep cold sets in.<\/p>\n
Grizzly bears have coexisted alongside the Nuxalk nation for generations. But the area, dubbed the \u201cgateway to the Great Bear Rainforest\u201d in tourism campaigns, has seen increased numbers of grizzly bears in recent years that residents say have disrupted a delicate balance. Nuxalk leadership say both human action, such as logging, and the effects of climate change, including forest fires and droughts, have disrupted key food sources and displaced bears.<\/p>\n
Residents have reported seeing bears more commonly in their yards and experienced occasional break-ins.<\/p>\n
Tanyss Munro, who lives with her husband in the Bella Coola valley, told CityNews that she returned home last month to find their front door smashed in. Inside their house, the kitchen was destroyed and their fridge had been dragged to the yard. A metal trailer in their yard was also destroyed.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The bears] had ripped off, and folded in half, the steel-clad door and gone in there and just demolished that,\u201d she said. \u201cThey wrecked the furnace. We had just had it filled up with propane. And that was all gone\u2026 and just everything was smashed,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The BC Wildlife Federation (BCWF) warned that Thursday\u2019s attack, which conservation officers called \u201catypical\u201d, reflects a broader trend in the province. The group, which advocates for hunters, said a decision to ban trophy hunting of grizzly bears in 2017 \u2013 a decision the group said was made \u201cdue to popular opinion, with no scientific rationale\u201d \u2013 was partly to blame.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the 10 years preceding the ban, calls to the [conservation officers] concerning grizzly conflicts ranged from 300 to 500 a year, peaking between April and November,\u201d the group said. \u201cSince the ban, calls about grizzly bears doubled, to nearly 1,000 a year.\u201d But the group\u2019s call to revive the trophy hunt has created fissures in the hunting community, reflecting the controversial nature of the hunt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea of hunting to manage bears, it\u2019s an old way of thinking that we really need to change and examine. And First Nations communities, like the Nuxalk nation have shown there is a different approach. They don\u2019t manage wildlife because it\u2019s not something to manage. They\u2019re stewards,\u2019 said Nicholas Scapillati, head of the non-profit Grizzly Bear Foundation.<\/p>\n
Many of the more isolated First Nations communities in the region have bear education programs that reflect a more holistic way of interacting with grizzlies.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we see a change in food sources and forest fires, things are fluctuating. Bears are on the move and moving around in different ways. And so we need to think differently than how we have for centuries in this province,\u201d said Scapillati.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst Nations communities have been leaders in this area. And so not only do they need support for us now in this time with this rare attack, but they also need support on the plans they\u2019ve shown us are needed to do what they\u2019ve long known is possible: coexistence with bears.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Conservation officers in British Columbia are still searching for a female grizzly bear and her two cubs, four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[85,46,141,386],"class_list":{"0":"post-150948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}