You can’t scare easily when all that stands between you and a 600-pound grizzly is a couple of barking dogs.
Carrie Hunt apparently comes by that naturally.
The founder and director of Florence’s Wind River Institute–Wind River Karelian Bear Dog Partners has spent most of her life working to reduce conflicts between humans and bears.
It was a path that she’d been on since she was 8 years old and first read Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.”
“I knew right then I was going to help bears, wolves, dogs get along with people,” Hunt remembers. “My parents supported me right from the beginning …They wanted me to follow my dream. My father said he didn’t want me waking up every morning dreading having to go to work. He wanted me to be excited about my life.”
And so it was only natural that when she got her first opportunity to work on the project that would launch her career, her then 59-year-old mother, Alicia, volunteered to help.
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It was the early 1980s and Hunt had just spent time working with collared grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park. All three of the bears she had tracked ended up dead after they ventured outside the park following a conflict with humans.
Hunt was determined to find a deterrent that would keep both humans and bears safe. She found the perfect partner and mentor in world-renowned bear expert Chuck Jonkel. He agreed to take her on as a graduate student and helped set up an experiment at Fort Missoula’s old prisoner of war camp.
Live bears that had been captured and slated to be killed were put in the old stockade, where Hunt tried everything from foghorns to flares to opening umbrellas in looking for a way to deter a bear on the attack.
Her mother — wearing a black garbage bag to ensure she always looked the same — stood at the end of the pen and stomped her feet to get the bears to charge.
“Every time we finished, she would go to her car and eat candy,” Hunt said, with a smile.
Her graduate project eventually led to the development of capsaicin bear spray that backcountry users now commonly carry as a last resort in encounters with bears. Her mother tagged along with her to British Columbia, where Hunt tested the new product out on bears attracted to garbage dumps.
“That work launched my career,” she said. “My mother was right there with me at its beginning.”
For Hunt, it’s been a career of firsts and filled with adventure.
She was involved with the first use of rubber bullets as a non-lethal way to encourage bears to leave an area. Hunt took part in the first hard releases of grizzly bears. But she’s most famous — and most proud — of her work using Karelian bear dogs to train bears to steer clear of human-provided attractants to remain wild and alive.
Since 1996, Hunt has worked in the United States, Canada and Japan to train bear dogs and their new handlers in the “bear shepherding” techniques that modify a bear’s behavior to keep both them and humans safe.
Karelian bear dogs originate from Finland, where the breed is known for its ability to pursue large game safely.
“They are not a good pet for people,” Hunt said. “They want to leave you on the trail. They need to be used. They are super smart, but they’re not the breed for a casual dog owner.”
Hunt’s dogs are bred to want to engage with bears. Wolves kill bear cubs when they get the opportunity, so bears instinctively don’t like canines.
Over the years, Hunt has learned how to use the dogs and tools like rubber bullets to teach bears to avoid people and the places they hang out. She often works with a partner and the pair brings four dogs on leashes.
“We’ve been able to walk a grizzly bear with cubs right out of a campground,” Hunt said. “The process we use is very specific. We are teaching the bears a lesson that makes sense to the bears because it’s part of how they evolved to survive. It’s a life lesson.”
“Here you are with the dogs and you’re shooting at them with rubber bullets or beanbags, but they know you’re not trying to kill them,” she said. “You are teaching them a lesson that this is mine and you can’t be here when I’m here. They respect that.”
She and her team have worked hundreds of bears without an injury to the bears, dogs or people.
Hunt has written a manual on her techniques that she plans to edit this winter. She wants to focus on restoring her breeding program and getting more dogs into the hands of people who manage bears.
“The idea is to teach bears to stay wild and not show themselves to people,” Hunt said. “We push them out of sites that they should not be using and into cover.”
Her longtime colleague and friend, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear specialist Jamie Jonkel, said the bear dogs have been a longtime dream for Hunt.
Beyond using the dogs to provide adverse conditioning to bears, they are also “wonderful tools” for education, Jonkel said.
Hunt’s dogs will show a homeowner every place that a bear visited while on their property. That’s often an eye-opener for people when the dogs take them to places where they buried a deer carcass years ago or where squirrels have cached dog food or even to a place where a grandfather used to put a salt lick.
“Her dogs are cool,” Jonkel said. “They just open people’s eyes up to what’s happening on their property.”
Hunt hopes to see more wildlife agencies, national parks and other land management agencies start to use the bear dogs in the future to help manage grizzlies and black bears.
“I believe they can become as important of a tool as telemetry and polar fleece has been to my generation of biologists,” Hunt said. “There’s not been one bear manager that I’ve placed a dog with that’s gone back … We need to get more dogs into the ownership of different agencies and wildlife managers. I know they can play an important role in bear management.”
By Perry Backus
Associate Editor
Reporter for The Ravalli Republic.
https://ravallirepublic.com/news/local/bear-shepherds-carrie-hunts-dogs-train-bears-to-steer-clear-of-people/article_1cee0868-18ab-5762-89a9-837f026e052b.html