Sharing is caring!

You may wonder about the question mark in the title. I hope the blog will answer your question about it. Last weekend a woman was killed by a black bear not far from here. It happened on an island in the Rainy River. The Rainy River forms part of the international border between the United States and Canada. The island is rather remote and it took law enforcement over 1/2 hour by boat to reach it. The island is actually in Canada, but the woman who was killed was from Minnesota. The story is she heard her dogs barking and went to investigate and never returned. Law enforcement was called and the RCMP, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, responded. They found the woman’s body and the bear was still there and acted aggressively, so they killed the bear to be able to recover the woman’s body. The story is more complicated than it sounds. A black bear attack is very rare and someone being killed is even rarer. A black bear is considered a medium-size bear. An adult male can reach 600 pounds, but females are much smaller and never exceeding 200 pounds. None of the reports about this attack stated the sex of the bear. Those are some bits of knowledge you need to know to make sense out of this story. The other is you never let your dogs wander here in the Northwoods on their own because they will harass wildlife. They will run and even kill a deer or anything else that will run from them because that’s their instinct. They will even do that to a bear. I suspect because the woman was on an island she felt she could let her dogs run. What happened next was a tragedy for both the woman and the bear. When she heard all the noise her dogs were making, she went to investigate. She somehow got involved in the confrontation between the bear the dogs; perhaps trying to save one of her dogs who was injured but survived. The bear was busy defending itself and perceived her as a threat and that’s likely how she got killed. When the RCMP arrived, the bear was guarding its kill, the woman, because the body had become a food source for it. Black bears pretty shy creatures but there are two things you never want to do. The first is never get between a mother bear and her cubs. The second is never make a move that the bear would interpret as you wanting to take its food away. If a bear has grabbed one of your birdfeeders or something out of your trash, you can yell at it and it will run away, but never go and try to take a birdfeeder or hunk of trash away from it! I think now you can see why there is a question mark in the title of this blog. The bear was acting out of instinct and was not attacking but defending itself.