Anyone who lived in Jasper Park in the period preceding the 1960's sure knew about bears as they lived with them and their troublesome habits all throughout the summer. Bears wandered through the town like dogs. Although they were most active in town at night there was always one or two active on the edge of town and often down-town in mid-day...
You could not walk down a back alley after dark without running into a bear every couple of blocks...scavenging in the garbage cans. They frightened the tourists by strolling across the lawns and sometimes coming up behind them...
...When a bear saw a nice white [golf] ball rolling over the grass near him, he sometimes got up and strolled over for a look and more often than not picked it up in his teeth and wandered away. The dilemma was then to try and recover the ball from the bear — not wise — and if not, how to score that stroke...
I delivered groceries after school for Jasper Hardware and Grocery...and you had to watch the back door very closely or a bear would wander into the store attracted by the smells. One day I was loading the truck for deliveries and...I noticed that a loaf of bread was missing...I looked around ans saw a big black bear strolling away toward the C[anadian].N[ational].R[ailway]. station with the bread in his mouth. He crossed the station platform, which was crowded with people off the train, and never looked right nor left...
There was no hollering or shouting, no fuss, no muss, and nobody trying to shoot him or immobilize him with a drugged dart as they do now. It was just a bear.
Our house was just off the edge of the townsite at the foot of Pyramid Hill and I have seen as many as eight bears go through our yard in the interval between supper-time and dark...
If you strolled along the banks of the Miette River in the daytime you could see bears of all colours and sizes, big bears, little bears, black bears, brown bears, cinnamon bears and shades in between, sleeping in the trees or at the foot of the big trees, or swimming in the Pond or Dead Man's Hole to cool off...
The kids used the Pond to swim in and sometimes there would be a bear enjoying the deep end and a few kids splashing around at the shallow other end...
Even with all those bears around nobody got hurt from bears. One or two tourists got bit or scratched on the arm while trying to feed the bears by hand in spite of being warned not to — but nothing serious...
In the 1960's the Park Authorities destroyed [just say killed ffs] a lot of bears when they persisted in coming into town or to the campgrounds and also "bear-proofed" the garbage cans and buried and burned the garbage so that the food source was generally eliminated. The result of those actions was to slowly erode the bear population down to a very small portion of their former numbers, and a tourist is very lucky if he sees a bear in the park today, although there are still a few coming to the campgrounds at night. I think they learned that if they came around in daylight they would probably get a bullet in the head or an immobilising dart in the arse.
–Bruce Neighbour, Memories of a Mountain Man
My grandmother lived in jasper around the same time and has said the same thing: the locals were fine with the bears, the tourists did foolish shit like trying to take closeup pictures
Normal bear behavior is foraging the woods
Foraging trash is easier than foraging for food, so bears stop foraging for natural food sources. My town has a lot of black bears, and there is a huge concentration of bears that legitimately just live in the city dump and eat nothing but garbage.
Eating garbage, and especially being fed by humans directly, causes bears to lose their natural fear of people. They break into houses, or approach people and become aggressive when they are not fed. These behaviors get the bear labeled as a problem, and then get euthanized or airlifted hundreds of miles away.
The bear is “insane” because it would rather walk hundreds of miles back to the source of trash or human feeding that it was relying on, rather than forage for natural food (or even a different source of trash)
Bears are foragers. Whatever the easiest and most reliable source of food they have encountered is what they will hone in on and continue to search for. The same instinct that allows them to remember where some berry patch was last year is the same instinct that gets hijacked when they have unnatural food sources that replenish daily
Bears are not meant to live like that. Dont feed bears
Bears, like humans, are animals capable of learning and adapting, and developing attachment to a place and types of food. Even in "nature," they develop specific preferences. I don't find it "insane" at all that an animal would travel hundreds of miles to get back home. To me, the thing we should be labelling as a problem ("insane" as you put it) is the society that says, for the bears own good, they must be shot to death because they keep trying to go home
Similarly, the very fact that bears can lose their "natural" fear of people means it is a learned behaviour rather than some intrinsic behaviour of all bears. The fact that every account i've heard of the bears in Jasper asserts a lack of serious harm done even to the tourists tells me the issue isn't with the bears being overly aggressive, but bourgeois society being to stingy with its food. Bears adapting to human societies in peaceful ways was neat and good (and there are other examples to observe, e.g. Hyenas in some cities in east Africa)
To extend your logic "bears are foragers etc" to its absurd conclusion (that what is "natural" is inherently good), we should force all humans to engage in the "natural" behaviour of foraging too. This would require the extermination of upwards of most of the human species? Well, at least the dead will know they died for their own good. The survivors will surely think "Sure, the human population was larger in the old days. But those people were locked into extremely unhealthy behavioral cycles." If anyone complains about death from diabetes they can be told: "Humans are not meant to live like that. Don't cure diseases."
Dude stop wasting time writing nonsense crap and actually look at shit published by people who study bears for their entire life. Trying to make feeding bears some antiborgioise nonsense is legitimately the dumbest shit ive ever heard in my life.
You obviously have never lived around any bears or we wouldnt even be having this conversation
I'm basing my views on things written by animal scientists like "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" by Frans de Waal, in addition to works on local history (written by people who've lived around bears), theory written by indigenous people. I've talked to people who've lived around bears who share my views, so clearly people's views are less monolithic than you present.
If you wanna actually share research instead of namecalling I'd be happy to learn more, but as it stands, based on what you've told me, the only ones harming bears have been the ones shooting them. You haven't mentioned any negative effects beyond it being not "natural."