A bear attack in Alaska resulted in one woman in the hospital and a whole neighborhood on alert.
What’s happening?
Alaska’s News Source reported that a 36-year-old woman went jogging in a Kenai neighborhood early one August morning, only to become the victim of a bear attack.
A neighbor woke to hear the barking, wolf-like sound of a bear sometime before daylight and assumed the bear was in a scuffle with a dog or simply wandering around. When daylight arrived, he went outside to investigate, only to find the heavily injured woman.
The unnamed woman was suffering from significant wounds to the scalp and face, but was awake and aware when the man found her. When emergency services arrived, they took the woman to a hospital in Anchorage for treatment via medevac.
Alaska Wildlife Trooper David Lorring explained to Alaska’s News Source, “She made it probably 50 yards from her house. The bear came out of another property, it looks like it attacked her … and dragged her approximately 100 yards down the road onto this guy’s property.”
Why are human-wildlife encounters concerning?
Human-wildlife encounters have a significant risk of going wrong, as this woman’s experience illustrates.
Encountering wildlife can lead to injury, as in this case, or even death in some cases, as wild animals will attack when provoked (and sometimes when not provoked). When this happens, if authorities can capture the wild animal after the fact, they will often euthanize it, hindering conservation efforts and depleting wildlife populations.
While authorities could not initially locate the bear responsible for this attack, they stated that if found, it would be put down.
However, in many instances, encounters such as this one aren’t the wild animal’s fault. The growth of the human population, changes in climate, and extreme weather events are just a few of the factors that have resulted in habitat loss for many wildlife species, creating shortages in natural resources for them and driving them from their homes and into neighborhoods in search of what they need.
This forced migration increases the risk of human-wildlife encounters, which can lead to more attacks by wild animals, such as the Alaskan bear attack.
How can I protect myself from these encounters?
Protecting the environment around you is the best way to prevent encounters with wild animals. By taking care of the ecosystem around you, wildlife can stay in its natural habitats and thrive, rather than being forced into migration, which reduces the risk of human-wildlife interactions.
Additionally, always taking safety precautions and staying vigilant when going outdoors is vital. As Lorring told Alaska’s News Source, “If you do get out in the woods, make sure you can hear your surroundings and what is going on. And that can be as simple as putting in one AirPod and not two.”
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