In response to Toogee Sielsch’s Sept. 20 letter, “Black bear research within the Lake Tahoe Basin is important,” BEAR League would like to answer directly because the accusation of hypocrisy at the center of his letter doesn’t hold up.

Sielsch asks why anyone would question black bear research while also supporting coexistence, and he suggests those of us who do are being inconsistent because we name bears and track their movements ourselves. But the difference isn’t subtle. When we learn to recognize a bear by an ear notch, a limp, or a patch of missing fur, we’re describing an animal as it already is. BEAR League has started using facial recognition software to identify individual bears based on the thousands of bear images we have collected. But when a bear is run down, trapped, darted, and drugged unconscious so a tooth can be pulled, a radio collar cinched around its neck and plastic tags drilled through its ears, something is done to that animal — something that carries real risk of injury, or of a mother being separated from cubs in the chaos of pursuit. Watching a bear is not the same act as immobilizing one, and treating them as equivalent is a rhetorical trick, not an argument.

We’re also skeptical of the Sielsch’s premise that twenty years of trapping and collaring in this basin has actually made bears and people safer. Clearly, Lake Tahoe has a bear population more dense than in other parts of the state, and those bears regularly encounter humans. If research were delivering the management breakthroughs Sielsch’s letter promises, we’d expect fewer break-ins, fewer bears killed on the road, fewer euthanized as “public safety” removals — not the numbers we at BEAR League have lived with and responded to for 30 years. What has reliably reduced conflict, wherever it’s been tried seriously worldwide, is bear-resistant trash infrastructure, code enforcement on attractants, and educating residents and tourists not to feed bears, intentionally or by leaving a cooler on the porch. None of that requires a collar or an ear tag. It requires people changing their own behavior, which is a harder sell than a GPS dataset.

Sielsch’s letter draws a sharp line between “research” and “lethal removal” and asks us to trust that DNA evidence now protects non-target bears from being killed by mistake.

We’d simply note that the agencies doing the collaring are the same agencies that
decide which bears get labeled unmanageable and are killed— often bears we’ve
known by name for years, whose entire “conflict history” is that they learned trash cans are full of food because nobody secured them. “Research” framed as neutral data collection still feeds directly into removal decisions. A community living under that reality is entitled to ask whether the data serves the bear and public, or whether it merely serves to check a box on paperwork to justify lethal removal, whether by state agencies or increased hunting opportunities.

BEAR League certainly doesn’t oppose all wildlife science, and we don’t romanticize risk to people — anyone who’s taken our hotline calls at 2 a.m. knows that. What we oppose is the assumption that invasive handling is the only path to good decisions.

Sielsch implies that questioning such action is “primal emotion” rather than our three decades of on-the-ground experience with these bears and this community. Sielsch is new to this issue. BEAR League is not. We’d rather spend the next thirty years on bear-proof dumpsters and electric wiring than on more traps. If Sielsch wants fewer bears hit by cars and fewer bears killed, we agree completely — we just don’t think trapping, collars, and ear tags are what gets us there.

-BEAR League