Welfare-centered approaches to managing wild bear conflicts with human communities, covering non-lethal deterrents, food security measures, bear behavior understanding, and coexistence program outcomes.
Bear welfare in human-conflict situations is shaped by the trajectory from initial exploration to food conditioning to lethal removal — a trajectory that can be interrupted at multiple points with appropriate intervention. Bears that learn to access human food sources are caught in a welfare trap: they experience reinforced behavior that ultimately leads to their death. Prevention through landscape-scale attractant management is both more effective and more welfare-positive than reactive deterrence or removal. When individual bears do become problematic despite preventive efforts, non-lethal management including rubber bullets, aversive conditioning, and relocation is preferred over lethal removal — both for the individual bear's welfare and for maintaining the ecological role of bears in functioning ecosystems.