US Park Rangers Once Fed Bears to Draw Crowds

The National Park Service’s strange and long-standing tolerance for feeding bears is most famously embodied by Yogi Bear, an ursine cartoon character who, clad in a porkpie hat and short necktie, cheerfully swiped park visitors’ picnic baskets. Yogi and his bear cub sidekick Boo Boo were portrayed not as wild animals but as good-natured chums, upright, chatty and tame enough to secure napkins around their necks before enjoying a purloined lunch.

When Yogi made his animated debut in 1958, the National Park Service was in the throes of a decades-long series of communication misfires about bears. The agency apparently could not decide: Were bears simply crowd-pleasing attractions that could be controlled with careful ranger supervision or did feeding the wild omnivores constitute a reckless danger to humans and bears themselves?

The first officially recorded bear-related fatality in 1916—the year the National Park Service was founded—took place in Yellowstone. The incident was clearly not the first bear-related death in the Yellowstone region. The area had been home to bears and humans for millennia before European explorers wandered through and long before it was established as our country’s first national park in 1872.

The 1916 mauling of the 61-year-old park worker (by a grizzly known as Old Two Toes) was likely added to the official record as a warning to the increasing number of people traveling to the park. (Visitor numbers had climbed from 300 in 1872 to almost 38,000 in 1916.) Old Two Toes had been spotted raiding campsites in the area all season in search of food and had injured two people. The obituary, along with publicly posted tallies of bear-related injuries, may have cautioned visitors against indulging the charming antics of these seemingly harmless creatures.

The consequences of feeding and interacting with bears weren’t limited to human injury or death. In 1917, Yellowstone had to euthanize 16 bears because they’d become reliant upon humans for food, making them a threat to visitors and staff.

Throughout the growing parks system, clever bears continued to discover that where there were humans, there was also easy food. There were reports of bears lingering near camps and hotels. The animals raided kitchens, automobiles and storage sheds. But rather than scaring people off, the bears and their rather public activity attracted more visitors, eager to see and interact with wildlife. Kitchen and concession staff, seeing how much guests enjoyed the show, began feeding the bears to delight the crowds and further attract customers.

At Yellowstone, Yosemite and Sequoia, NPS staff set up garbage dumps within walking distance of hotels and campsites. At sunset, guests and bears alike would congregate at the dumps for “bear shows.” Park rangers, some mounted on horses and armed with rifles, would hold the line between wild animals feeding on the food waste and their delighted audience. Seeing the surge of interest, other parks adapted the practice, which continued through the 1930s.

Eventually, feeding platforms for the bears and bleachers for the humans were built and cute signage (“Lunch counter for bears only”) erected. Concessionaires sold bags of candy, labeled as bear food. The official posted NPS message about not feeding the bears was clearly muddled by the sideshow atmosphere.

Of course, the bears didn’t understand that the location and hours for getting food from humans were limited to the schedule posted in hotels and ranger stations. The bears began to appear alongside park roads and “hold up” passing cars, begging for food. Individual adult bears and mothers with cubs would block cars and buses, and visitors would gladly hand over food while photographing the interaction. Certain bears became famous for their bold highway robbery, including one in Yellowstone nicknamed Jesse James.

Anytime the easy source of food was removed or diminished, problems developed. During the offseason at the national parks, when hotels closed for winter, visitor numbers plummeted but bear numbers remained the same. The visitor slowdown during the Great Depression had the same effect. Bears that had become overreliant on human food sources began to vandalize park buildings and vehicles, and posed a hazard to year-round staff.

Bears were obviously not responsible. Park visitors—who were being told not to feed animals at the very same time that official brochures invited them to ranger-organized feedings at garbage dumps—couldn’t be blamed for being confused. Posted signs sometimes prohibited “hand-feeding” as opposed to other kinds of feeding or specified that bears could be fed but only away from populated areas.

An article, “Inconsistent Bear Policies,” published in the March-April 1938 edition of Park Service Bulletin, commented that the NPS policy “is more in the nature of admonitions and advice against bear feeding” rather than a strictly enforced regulation. The NPS message was still not clear enough.

In the 1940s, the NPS tried more direct ways to educate the public about bears. Though some pamphlets and posters showed bears in a more threatening light, just as often they depicted cartoonish beasts. The NPS seemed to go out of its way to avoid asking visitors to take responsibility for protecting themselves and bears, though. In 1944, one sign attempted to educate through humor by pretending its intended audience was the bears themselves, saying that “visitors mean well” but that the bears have to exercise self-control over their own diets. Not surprisingly, this tactic did not greatly change visitor behavior or instill in humans any fear of bears.

The postwar return of the crowds brought a surge of bad behavior. Between 1946 and 1955, park visitation increased from nearly 22 million people to more than 50 million, all of them eager to encounter wildlife firsthand. The underfunded and understaffed parks were unable to effectively enforce rules so that, even with a firmer NPS edict to stop bear feeding, the harmful behavior persisted. People kept getting hurt and rangers kept having to kill bears.

In his 1946 annual report, Newton B. Drury, then director of the National Park Service, wrote, “Year after year, hundreds of visitors insist on taking chances by handing these genuinely wild animals tidbits of food, and every year has its record of serious and even occasional fatal injuries to those who indulge in the practice.”

Over the remainder of the decade and through the 1950s, NPS brochures and signs became less cute and more bluntly informative about the dangers of feeding wild animals, listing, for each park, the annual number of humans injured or killed due to the practice and the number of animals that had to be destroyed because of it. Official signs about feeding wildlife began to use the word “danger” instead of a slightly more circumspect “caution.”

In 1960, an NPS bear-management policy was adopted that emphasized returning the animals to a more natural state in both habitat and diet, educating visitors on how they could help and developing new bear-proof designs for trash storage and food storage in campgrounds.

By the 1970s, the no-feeding policy was consistently enforced throughout the NPS system. The sudden switch initially created some havoc. At Yosemite National Park, wildlife personnel reported that local black bears had become more efficient at breaking into vehicles.

At Yellowstone, there was an uptick in the number of bears that died of starvation, unable to adapt to the shift of their food sources. Overall, though, in the national parks where bears lived, the numbers reflected the success of the strong, enforced policy. Data revealed sizable reductions in bear-related human injuries and fatalities as well as in property damage to cars and park buildings.

In the decades since the NPS policy was tightened and enforced, far fewer bears have been euthanized, a data point that should be celebrated by all humans who’ve been captivated by real-life bears and not just cartoon characters.