A taste for blood?

July 20, 2022 9:26 PM

I have a question about animal attacks - more below the fold. CW: animal and people death

I've seen several news stories this past week of wild animals killing people in the US (alligators in Florida, bear in Montana) and "officials " (rangers, police etc.) trapping the animal and killing it because it now "has a taste for humans" (they may not explicitly say that, but it is at least inferred).

Is that real or an excuse for an-eye-for-an-eye? It's not like you are teaching the other alligators a lesson...or are you? Why are they hunting down and killing these animals - is there a scientific reason to believe that they would continue to attack people?

posted by Toddles to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

The first chapter of Mary Roach's Fuzz is about animal attacks; you might be interested.

There are only two options; either the animal actually intended to hunt and kill a person, or it wound up in another situation where a person was killed, because the animal felt afraid or something like that.

I think it's reasonably self-evident that if the animal views humans as desirable prey, then leaving it in a situation where it can hunt and eat more people is bad. This is virtually never the case with bears (or wolves) -- alligators (or big cats) I dunno.

If it's entirely situational, animals generally have multiple options available to them; fleeing, intimidating, fighting, etc. For whatever reason, the animal in question chose a violent response, which suggests that they're (for whatever reasons of animal psychology we cannot plumb) more likely to select a violent response the next time they're in a potentially dangerous situation with a person. Any animal (humans included) that has engaged in a behaviour in the past is more likely to engage in it in the future, all else being equal.

The point isn't that we're teaching the other alligators a lesson; the point is that it's not reasonable to teach the killer alligator to mend it's ways and sin no more, because it's a wild animal.

Note that in some cases at least, animals that do behave in non-lethal but dangerous ways, such as 'problem' bears that raid garbage dumps and become habituated to people are typically given second chances -- trapped and taken to locations far from human habitation at great effort, by the exact same rangers who kill animals that kill us.
posted by Superilla at 9:56 PM on July 20, 2022 [12 favorites]

Here in Canada, they will not always kill a grizzly bear that attacked a person when the bear was defending itself (it was surprised, someone got between a mother and a cub, it was defending a kill, etc), but they generally will when the bear was thought to be hunting someone. This can be controversial and is an evolving policy with some thought going into it. 20 years ago, bears that attacked people were generally killed, no questions asked.

Realistically, if a bear attacks someone unprovoked once, it does seem reasonable to think they might do it again. Most bears, of course, don't attack people and generally ignore us or run away from us, so if a bear does attack someone for no specific reason, you have to conclude that the bear is inclined to attack people on some level. There are plenty of examples from the real world of one bear attacking multiple people in separate incidents.

I'm sure the potential legal or PR ramifications of not killing a bear that attacks or kills a person are also top of mind, especially in busy areas like parks. You can imagine that people would be upset and/or litigious if a bear that had previously attacked someone later killed a second person.

There are certainly some people who think any bear that kills someone or even attacks someone should be killed for eye-for-an-eye reasons and that certainly influences policies.

I think US policy tends to favour killing bears who attack people more than Canadian. I think the responsibility for these decisions tends to be more local in the US, with quite a few different players, while in Canada this generally falls to a provincial wildlife agency or Parks Canada.
posted by ssg at 10:29 PM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

I don't know much about alligators but I have been reading about bears over the last few years. I was surprised to learn that the vast majority of human deaths caused by bears in the US and Canada are considered to be predatory. That means the bear intended to kill the person for food. I think in popular culture there's this idea that bears are mostly dangerous in defensive situations but that's not really true. Bear attacks are very rare and the vast majority of bears are afraid of humans - given the choice they will run and hide. But some minority of bears figure out that humans are edible and relatively easy to kill. It's not that they get a "taste for blood" - it's like you never eat apples because you think red things are poisonous. Then you get hungry enough to try one and realize they are nutritious and just grow there on trees.

On the very rare occasion that bears kill for another reason, typically nowadays there is an investigation. For example in Montana a few years ago, a mountain biker unexpectedly collided with a bear on the trail. The bear was surprised and attacked the biker, killing him. The investigation concluded the bear reacted naturally/defensively and the bear was not killed.
posted by muddgirl at 10:30 PM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

The Man Eaters of Kumaon [1944] by Jim Corbett supplies a good bit of the data, or mind-set. That was about tigers Panthera tigris and leopards Panthera pardus in South Asia, some of which killed dozens or hundreds of people before being dispatched by Corbett. One of Corbett's theories was that wild carnivores started on humans having been first exposed to farm workers bending over to cultivate/weed crops. That silhouette made humans look more like deer - horizontal head-neck-torso acted as a triggering release mechanism.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:37 PM on July 20, 2022

Sure, it's reasonable to think that an animal that attacked and killed a human once might do it again. I googled to see if I could find the same stories you might have seen and I found two stories about bear attacks in Montana. One was about an attack that happened last year - a bear that had gotten used to checking campgrounds for food attacked a woman with the apparent intent of killing and eating her. You can see why people would consider that bear a real threat if it stayed alive. It had learned that campgrounds were a source of food, so it was likely to keep coming around people, and it had shown that it was willing to consider humans as prey. If it successfully killed one person sleeping in a tent, why would it not try to kill other people sleeping in tents? The other bear attack story I found was about a man who was apparently killed by a grizzly but officials saw no evidence that it was a predatory attack or that the bear had sought out the person, so they did not try to track down the bear.

I'm not sure if killing alligators that have attacked humans makes as much sense. I don't know much about alligators. I don't know if they learn from their experiences and have individual variations in their behavior to the extent bears do. It may be that just about any alligator big enough to eat a human would give it a try if a human happened to be nearby and grabbable at a time when the alligator was hungry. If there are alligators big enough to kill people in most bodies of water near areas heavily used by people and if most of them would attack a person if they got the chance, then there probably is no good reason to kill the occasional one that gets that chance and takes it. But if alligators big enough to kill people are uncommon or if most alligators prefer other types of prey, then it would make sense to try to remove ones that have proven themselves to be a danger.

Mammals definitely have a lot of individual variation in their behaviors based on their individual experiences and personalities and some develop habits that are really likely to make them dangerous to people. It's not so much that they develop a "taste for human blood." But if they learn that areas used by people are good places to look for food and that they don't need to be overly frightened of people, that alone makes them dangerous because it means they are likely to keep coming close to people and could attack if they feel threatened or get startled. If they also learn that humans can be prey, that obviously makes them even more dangerous.
posted by Redstart at 6:38 AM on July 21, 2022

I was surprised to learn that the vast majority of human deaths caused by bears in the US and Canada are considered to be predatory.

The study discussed in this article in the Anchorage Daily News might be the source. A point relevant to the question below:

No fatal attacks involved more than one bear, and almost all were adult males.
Bears that have previously killed are most likely to act aggressively again.
People traveling or camping alone were the mostly likely victims- almost 70 percent of the fatalities involved a single person. Only 9 percent of attacks occurred with more than 2 people present.
Human food and garbage tended to attract aggressive black bears and might increase the likelihood of a serious bear attack.
posted by oneirodynia at 3:16 PM on July 21, 2022 [1 favorite]