In late August of 2020, residents of the tiny rural town of Haines, Alaska (population 2,500) were alarmed when gunfire erupted in a residential neighborhood. The shots were fired by a Haines police officer and an Alaska Wildlife trooper who responded to a call and found two bears breaking into an empty cabin. The bears did not respond to deterrents, so they opened fire, killing one and injuring the other. The officers followed the injured bear but couldn’t fire again due to the proximity of houses. When the officers returned to the abandoned cabin, two more bears had arrived. The trooper told the Chilkat Valley News that they shot these bears because they were displaying “possessive aggression.” He said that eight bears in total showed up at the site. Four of them lay dead and at least two more had gunshot wounds.

In total that summer, residents and law enforcement killed at least 49 brown bears in Haines — about one-fifth of the local bear population. There is some evidence that the number killed might be as high as 60. Most were shot.

Between June and November, there were bear shootings nearly every week. While some of the bears were legally shot during hunting season, more than half were shot by residents and police “in defense of life or property,” or DLP. Alaska state law allows the killing of game in DLP after “all other practicable means to protect life and property are exhausted.” However, this does not include killing in cases where the bear is attracted to “garbage or a similar attractive nuisance,” provocation of the animal, or invasion of its habitat. Police do not need permission from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) to deal with an immediate threat, but they do require approval to kill a “problem” bear. Unfortunately, these problem bears are often mothers, or sows, searching for food to feed their cubs. If a sow is shot in DLP, her cubs are usually also shot because they cannot survive by themselves.

That summer, bears got into compost piles and raided outdoor game freezers, garbage cans, chicken coops, and even garages and homes across Haines. They broke through doors at a mini-storage facility on four separate occasions, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage.

Residents called the summer “Bearpocalypse.” Haines is used to dealing with bears, but that summer was exceptional. State wildlife biologist Carl Koch said, “2020 was like nothing I’ve ever heard of.” In 2019, the Haines Police Department had received 41 bear-related calls by September. By the same time in 2020, they had received 258 calls, a six-fold increase. In 2020, over the course of the entire year, the police received over 400 calls related to bears, compared to 189 in 2019. There were only 79 bear-related calls to the police department in 2018.

Part of what made the summer exceptional was a dearth of food. Haines sits between two major salmon-producing rivers on the Chilkat Peninsula in Southeast Alaska, about 90 miles north of the capital city, Juneau. The lives of brown bears in coastal Alaska are tied closely to the lives of salmon. A poor salmon or berry season leads bears to move in search of alternative food sources, which means they often move through town. That leads to increased interaction with people, and a greater likelihood of residents and officers using DLP to shoot them.

The summer of 2020 was both a poor salmon and a poor berry season in Southeast Alaska. According to ADFG, 2020 was one of the worst years for salmon harvest on record in the fisheries management area that includes Haines. Commercial catch of salmon was drastically below the ten-year average for each of the five species of Pacific salmon. The North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission reported Pacific salmon to be at their lowest levels in almost 40 years despite record numbers of juvenile salmon released from hatcheries. Brian Riddell, a scientist with Pacific Salmon Foundation, told Business in Vancouver magazine that it was “the largest single-year decline ever quantified … I don’t think there’s any question that what we’re seeing in recent years is an ocean-impact effect, which is going to be linked to climate effects.”

Shannon Donahue, executive director of the Great Bear Foundation in Haines said, “Bears are incredibly food-motivated. Brown bears must consume an average of twenty to thirty thousand calories per day through the summer” as their survival through the winter depends on building fat stores in the short summer months.

Even in normal natural food years, Haines has a history of higher bear interactions and DLP killings than other parts of Alaska. “Part of it has to do with the geography of the Chilkat Valley itself,” said Donahue, “We see it even in the way the people interact — everyone hemmed into this little valley. Prime bear habitat is also prime human habitat.” According to ADFG data, from 2009 to 2018 there were 21 DLP brown bear killings in total throughout the state. Over the same period, “Sixty-five percent of the non-hunt mortalities were in Unit 1D,” which includes both Haines and Skagway, though Haines accounts for most of the bear interactions. In other words, there were more bears killed in DLP or shot by police as “problems” in Haines during a single summer than in most of Southeast Alaska over a ten year period.

Researchers have found that DLP killings spike after reports of bear attacks, which often elicit sensational media attention. This suggests a kind of “broken windows” effect, where bear shootings lead to more people reporting bear activity, which leads to more shootings. In Haines, as in many rural parts of Alaska, bear-related calls go to the police department. There is strong incentive for police to respond to each call so they are not seen as ineffective. The decision to shoot is not mandatory for the officers. However, if a bear is on site and doesn’t flee or is causing property damage, the police currently have few other tools for dealing with bears other than lethal force.

In response to the “Bearpocalypse,” ADFG reduced the local hunting harvest limits for the 2021 season, from 16 to 5, with no more than two females to be killed, an effort to help the local population recover. Hunters bashed the new limits as unfair regulation. A few members of the Upper Lynn Fish and Game Advisory Committee called into question the science behind the change.

The Haines assembly approved sixteen bear-proof dumpsters for the town dump. They also drafted a small ordinance defining bear attractants and penalties for leaving them out. The ordinance passed 4-2, after it was amended so that a citation could be waived if the attractant was removed within a week.

Community members have brought other solutions to the table. The most intuitive solution — relocating problem bears — is extremely expensive and ineffective. A plan to hire specially trained Karelian bear dogs to haze bears away from the townsite was dismissed as too expensive. (A study in Washington using these dogs estimated that 80 percent of black bears hazed didn’t return to urban areas.) Another possible solution to reduce the number of bears killed in Haines could be Community Service Officers (CSO). Juneau has five CSOs who do not carry guns or make arrests, but instead enforce code and write tickets, including bear attractant violations.

Haines seems unlikely to implement any of these alternative solutions due to concern over costs, as well as a sense that killing bears works. In 2021, for example, a resolution to hire a “wildlife tech,” similar to a CSO, went before the Haines town council but came to nothing. The police chief spoke against it, concerned that it would eat into the police budget. What’s more, bear calls dropped drastically in 2021, from 452 to 177. So far there hasn’t been a single DLP killing in 2022. After a deadly 2020, fewer bears in the valley meant less competition for resources, and less human encounters. Salmon harvest also increased 98 percent statewide, indicating stronger returns for that year.

“Preventing bears from becoming food-conditioned in the first place is key,” Koch said. “Keeping bear attractants contained is critical if we don’t want to repeat the bear situation in 2020.” Some community members have stepped up. The privately-run town landfill installed an electric fence and some citizens started a fruit harvesting program where people can have their fruit trees picked so there isn’t as much bear-attracting rotting fruit around.

While human-bear conflict in Haines may be down for now, residents still have some important questions to answer for themselves. As Sherry Simpson writes in Dominion of Bears: Living with Wildlife in Alaska, “The real discussion is not simply about whether killing garbage-eating bears is wrong and, if so, what can be done to stop it. It’s also about what kind of people Alaskans want to be and what kind of wilderness they intend to live in.”