Grizzly bears recovering across their range increasingly encounter human settlements and food sources, leading to conflict situations that result in bear deaths and raise significant welfare concerns.
Human-grizzly conflict creates welfare harms for individual bears that are largely preventable through management of the human side of the equation. A bear that raids a garbage can is responding to the smell of food — a normal and adaptive behavior for an omnivore. Killing that bear for following its instincts to a food source that humans left accessible represents a preventable welfare harm. Proactive management approaches — bear-resistant garbage, removal of attractants, electric fencing around crops and livestock — reduce conflict encounters before they occur, keeping individual bears alive and wild. The alternative — reactive lethal control — imposes the ultimate welfare cost on individual animals for behavior that humans facilitated. Investment in conflict prevention is investment in bear welfare.