Why feeding grizzly bears is worse than you might think - National Geographic

Sow 101, a grizzly bear, has had a long and productive life. In her first 20 years, she ranged between Yellowstone National Park and the wild lands outside West Yellowstone, Montana, raising somewhere between three and four sets of cubs. She was the 101st grizzly to get a GPS collar as part of a National Park Service study—hence her name.But then, in the early ‘90s, she began eating garbage and pet food that had been carelessly left out by residents in a suburb north of town. Because of the risk of conflict with humans, wildlife officials relocated her deeper into the park. There she happily remained—for a while.Ten years later, however, there was a drought in Yellowstone, and food became scarce. Sow 101 sought out the place she’d come to learn, a decade earlier, had reliable food: the suburbs. So Sow 101 and her two cubs began eating people’s garbage and pet food once again.After repeatedly returning to the same houses to forage, wildlife officials decided she needed to be removed from the wild entirely. She and her two cubs posed too much of a danger to humans, says Trent Redfield, with the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, an educational wildlife facility that shelters human-acclimated bears and other wildlife, located just outside Yellowstone. (Read more: How can we learn to let the wild be wild in Yellowstone?)