Bears across multiple species face habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict, and welfare challenges from trophy hunting, poaching, and nuisance bear management that involves lethal control.
Bear welfare is shaped by an interaction between large home range requirements, dietary flexibility that brings them into conflict with humans, and their position as both feared and exploited animals. Human-food conditioning — bears learning to raid campsites, orchards, or beehives — typically ends with lethal removal of the bear rather than better human practices. This cycle causes enormous preventable welfare harm. Bear bile farming in parts of Asia inflicts some of the most severe documented animal suffering: bears in crush cages, with permanent catheter implants in their gallbladders, developing serious psychological disturbances from years of confinement. Trophy hunting of bears raises welfare questions about killing methods and wounded animals that escape. Better human-bear coexistence practices and global bear bile farming phase-outs would produce major welfare gains.