The Park is visited by thousands for whom the bears should be a source of relaxation and furnish new interests and enjoyment. But the bears are becoming unhealthy and are a menace to people. Now and then some official tries to cure the bear trouble by having a number of bears roped, tied, and whipped. Occasionally a bear is shot. There are those who advocate that the guides and officials of the Park carry guns; and still others are advocating the extermination of the grizzly. We need the grizzly. Most cures proposed are worse than his trouble. But there is a prevention in simply no garbage-piles.
In the Glacier National Park, which has been a wild-life reservation only since 1910, the grizzlies have not yet become demoralized by garbage. The grizzly bear situation in the Yellowstone is a serious and even an alarming one, and what exists here is certain to develop in other Parks. The demoralizing factors are likely to be expanded and not diminished. Then, too, in the Yellowstone this continuous eating of garbage may ere long bring on a pestilence among the grizzlies, or possibly put a check on the number of cubs born. The whole situation appears to be embraced in what I have previously said about what a grizzly is fed and how.
The grizzly has not lost all his old instincts in the Park. Around the garbage-piles he is a lazy, cross pensioner. But away from them, and especially where he ranges outside of the Park, the same bear is as alert and as energetic as ever in getting a living and watching out for his safety. They are tame near garbage-piles but a short distance away are wild. They are comparatively easy to trap near the garbage-piles, where they will enter a trap-door; but the same bear outside the Park is extremely wary and avoids going near a trap. Says William H. Wright, in "The Grizzly Bear":--
"Altogether I did not find the grizzlies of Yellowstone Park in any degree more tame or less cunning than they are to-day, for example, in the Selkirks. Many of them, it is true, come to the garbage-piles to feed, but these very bears, fifty yards back in the timber, are again as wild as any of them anywhere. At the cañon, the garbage-pile is in a hollow at the foot of rather a steep incline that leads up to the edge of the woods. Bear after bear, coming down the trails that converge toward this point, will stop as he reaches the brink of this declivity, glance downward, turn his head from side to side, and launch himself down hill, with the same air of committing himself to a foreign element that one sees in the upward glance and deep breath of a man launching himself from a diving board. On their return, they invariably halted for a few seconds at the top of the hill, looked around, occasionally shook themselves, and with their first step up the familiar trail, resumed every sign of their habitual caution and alertness. While on the garbage-pile itself, they appear to pay scant attention to the people gathered behind the fairly distant wire fence, but even there, an eye familiar with their actions would note the constant watch they kept on what was going on and the hurried way in which they fed; and, fifty feet from the edge of the surrounding timber, they would at the least scent or sound or sight, bolt as incontinently as in the farthest hills. Grizzlies are no more plentiful around the Park to-day than they were twenty-five years ago in the Bitter Roots, and a hundred yards from the garbage-pile they are no different."