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There’s a great apocryphal quote
about the bear-proof trash cans at Yosemite National Park.
When asked about the challenge of designing a perfect one,
a park ranger reportedly said that “there is considerable overlap
in intelligence between the smartest bear and the dumbest humans”.
We may never know for sure if this is a direct quote,
but it points to a simple truth that’s a big problem:
Humans throw away a lot of trash, and the bears are good at getting to it.
Brown bears can eat anywhere from 30 to 90 pounds of food a day
when they’re getting ready for hibernation.
Getting that much food is hard, and as humans have expanded our range
deeper and deeper into bear territory, hunting and foraging areas have shrunk,
making it even harder for bears to find the calories they need.
But that expansion of human communities has provided bears
with a pretty reliable source of food. Our garbage cans.
And while eating our trash gives bears a dinner
that humans were throwing out anyway,
there are lots of reasons we shouldn’t be letting bears go to town on our trash.
For starters, having bears wandering through town
to snack on trash leads to human-bear conflicts.
And when those happen, there are no winners.
People get hurt or killed, property gets destroyed,
and the bears tend to either get hit by vehicles or shot by animal control.
It’s not great for the bears’ original hunting grounds either,
because if it’s easy to get food from people,
they’re less likely to put effort into foraging back home,
which risks throwing off the balance of their whole ecosystem.
But it’s not just a question of herding bears back to their original territory.
Stopping bears from seeking out trash
is a lot more complicated than you might think.
Bears are social learners, and they figure out how to find food
from watching their moms foraging while they’re young.
So if mama bear has learned that humans are a great source of food,
she’ll teach her cubs that.
Then her daughters will teach their cubs, and so on.
And even if a bear isn’t taught to forage in trash cans,
sometimes they just get creative and figure it out for themselves.
Which is why we have generations of bears that are more than just occasional
consumers of our garbage, and have become reliant on human foods.
And it turns out that this wasn’t even by accident,
because people used to leave trash out for bears on purpose.
From the early 1900s through 1940,
trash in California’s Yosemite National Park went into a dump.
But not just any dump.
It was surrounded by bleachers and lights, so park visitors could come watch
the feeding frenzy as 20 to 30 bears fought each other for a shot at food.
Even after the feeding shows stopped, rangers continued leaving food out in order
to attract bears and provide photo opportunities for tourists until the early 1970s.
It’s entirely possible that bears in Yosemite are still passing down
human-food-based foraging behaviors that their ancestors learned
more than 100 years ago.
All the more reason that they want to nosh on our garbage.
Which is why we’ve had to start making complicated locking mechanisms,
or hanging food from a tree,
or all other manners of bear-deterrent methods to keep them out of the trash.
But these methods might not stop bears from trying to get at food.
It’ll only slow them down.
That’s because bears, like me, are food motivated.
Being food motivated means that one of the best ways to train them to perform a
task or solve a problem is to give them a reward of food when they’re successful.
We know lots of animals, including bears,
can perform a variety of actions to solve puzzles to get food,
including pulling pulleys, spinning tubes, and digging out of holes.
So a lot of our attempts to keep trash away from bears
just end up being a fun challenge for them, like any food puzzle would be.
They just want to solve it and get their food.
Which is why our need for bear-resistant trash cans is constantly growing.
And the biggest hurdle in making a trash can that’s impossible for bears
to open isn’t the bears’ lack of opposable thumbs
It has to do with whether the humans are actually going to use them.
Now, despite what our anecdotal park ranger said,
the challenge isn’t about humans figuring out how to use the trash cans.
It’s making it simple enough that they’re willing to use the trash cans.
See, it turns out people are lazy.
In one study in Durango, Colorado, a town that has major problems with bears
snacking in trash cans, only 42% of the trash cans in residential areas
and 31% of commercial trash cans were locked properly.
In the same study, only 50% of fully automatically locking
residential trash cans were locked.
Now, to be fair, part of that was because the locks were faulty or damaged,
but even when the city offered to replace faulty locks,
and it doesn’t seem like getting those replacements in place really happened.
And it’s not just a question of what people are smart enough to do or willing to do,
but also what they’re physically capable of doing.
Bear-resistant trash cans need to be strong and secure, but also ADA compliant,
so people with limited mobility and dexterity have to be able to operate them as well.
Some bear-resistant features that are used include metal reinforcements
so trashcans can’t be punctured by teeth and claws, lids with locks that have to be
pushed to open, or posts to secure cans to so they can’t be tipped over.
And with every technology, there’s always room for improvement.
So how do manufacturers prove that their bear-proof bins are better than the rest?
When a new design for a trashcan, cooler, or other container comes on the market,
it can actually be tested and certified as Bear-Resistant
by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee.
Despite the name, the committee is not made up of actual bears.
But they do employ them!
To get certified, a container has to survive 60 minutes
of a bear trying to get break in for a lunch break.
Some of the tester bears have been relocated after having been caught foraging
for human food multiple times,
sort of an ursine criminal-turned-FBI-consultant situation.
Others have been training to break into containers since they were six months old.
Hopefully none of the bears’ wild cousins
will ever find out that they’re working for the enemy.
Walking the line of creating trash cans that are accessible to people but not to bears
ends up being a race between engineers’ problem solving skills and the bears’.
But it's an important race that can protect both of our species.
And it’s only getting more important as climate change
and urban expansion continues to reduce bears’ natural foraging area.
When we get it right, it does work.
Widespread bear-resistant trash can use can,
in fact, reduce human-bear encounters significantly.
And we’re getting better at getting it right.
Now, about 50% of cans pass, compared to about 10%
when the certification process first started.
So hopefully one man’s trash will no longer be another bear’s treasure,
and they’ll both be better for it.
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