Bear foraging ecology drives seasonal movements and human encounters, with nutritional welfare and coexistence management deeply intertwined.
Bear nutritional welfare is highly context-dependent and tightly linked to landscape management. In years of natural food failure, bears face genuine nutritional stress that drives risk-taking behavior — raiding beehives, entering orchards, accessing garbage — that results in human-bear conflict and management kills. The welfare trajectory of a habituated bear is poor: once conditioned to human food, removal of access without alternative natural food drives continued problem behavior that typically ends in lethal control. Prevention through secure attractant management is vastly more welfare-effective than reactive management. Conservation groups working with municipalities to improve bear-proof garbage infrastructure demonstrate that community-scale interventions significantly reduce both bear mortality and human conflict.