Bear Colony at Colorado Landfill Creates Impossible Problem

Authorities are conflicted as to how to remove a family of bears that has lived on a garbage tip in Colorado for decades.

The bears, which number between 25 and 30, have frequented the Pitkin County Solid Waste Center landfill dump outside of Aspen, Colorado, since it was first formed over 60 years ago.

These bears, which have produced several generations of youngsters, have gained a taste for human food, and therefore are a nuisance to nearby neighborhoods—as well as occasionally a threat to humans. Local authorities now want to limit their access to the dump to prevent them from relying too heavily on human waste.

"What do you do with the bears? What's going to happen to the bears? There's no ideal situation," Kurtis Tesch, the district wildlife manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), told local news source Aspen Times. "So either we let them co-exist the way they are now and continue, or we make that abrupt change, and we affect the lives of all those bears that currently live there."

As human populations expand, the bears' natural habitats shrink, forcing the creatures to inhabit areas closer to man-made settlements. Bears that get a taste for human food from garbage dumps or elsewhere may be more prone to entering human areas, where they can access food sources such as trash, bird feeders, pet food, and unsecured compost piles. This can lead to conflicts as bears become habituated to human-provided food and lose their natural fear of humans. If bears in human zones pose a potential threat to human safety, authorities may be forced to intervene, sometimes leading to the relocation or euthanasia of the animal.

"In landscapes occupied by humans, it can become a problem for both humans and bears as any encounter between these two species often appears as a conflict," Edward Narayan, a senior lecturer in animal science at the University of Queensland, told Newsweek. "Bears may see humans as threats such as hunters and they can be aroused by humans that approach them without much warning."

The bears living near the dump tend to stay out of peoples' way, with landfill staff scaring them off with loud noises if they get too close. The bears have gorged themselves on the nutrient-rich human food from the dump, allowing them to raise much larger litters of cubs than they could in the wild.

"Once a bear is habituated to an unnatural food source, it won't revert," Tesch said. "If they go to a trash can, they can get thousands and thousands of calories out of that one trash can, compared to how many berries or how many acorns are they going to have to eat and how much energy they're gonna have to expel to consume that many calories. They're smart. They're not dumb. That's why they're there."

With these larger families—each mother bear raising litters of three and four cubs, rather than one or two— the bears are much closer to each other than normal.

"It's not normal. It's purely the amount of food source that is available. If it was a limited food source, the older male bears would chase the younger ones off and keep it for themselves," Tesch said. "But since there's such a large vast amount of supply there, they don't feel their food sources are threatened."

The bears also have been found to have plastic inside of their stomachs, as a result of foraging in the dump for the high-calorie human food waste. The garbage is coated with shredded tire material as per state regulations regarding burying trash, exposing the bears to microplastics.

"You can see bear poop with plastic bags and everything wrapped up in it. So it's not the best diet for them," Pitkin County Solid Waste Director Cathy Hall told the Aspen Times.

The local authorities are considering several options to prevent the bears from accessing the garbage dump, including building a fence around the dump. However, this would leave today's bears bereft of the only food source they know, having grown up only feeding from the dump, for the greater good of freeing future bears from dependence on human food waste.

Hall and Tesch presented several potential solutions to the bear problem at the Pitkin County Commissioners' work session on February 13, including electric fences. Fencing the area where the bears currently feed would cost around $400,000 for the fencing alone (not including construction costs), while fencing the whole dump would cost over $1 million.

"Electric fences are the only thing that's going to work. There's no other fence you could put up that a bear is not going to test, not going to try to dig under, not going to try to climb over. The construction of the fence would have to be metal posts, no wood posts," Tesch said. "Anytime there's overgrowth or a downed branch with anything that touches those wires, that's going to ground it out. It will almost have to be a daily walk on the property testing the wires... making sure everything's nice and tight all the way around."

However, this suggestion was met with concern about wildfire risk from the electricity, as well as the impacts on the bears that currently live in and around the dump, as they may venture out to human areas in search of the food they have become used to.

"The closest thing is going to be Aspen Village, where we already have issues with bears. And they will expand, they'll go out, cross the river to Upper River Road, they'll go to Wildcat (Ranch), they're going to look for a food source somewhere else, they won't revert back to natural forage," Tesch said. "The other option would be to euthanize all the bears inside, which CPW is not supportive at all."

For now, however, no solution has been reached at this strange garbage dump, and the bears and their cubs will continue to feast on our leftovers.

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