Reading Stephen Stringham's Beauty Within the Beast, I found a passage related to the issue of hunting affecting bear behavior towards people. It makes a very valid point and I couldn't resist posting it:
"My firsthand experience is that coastal Alaska brown bears are much more defensively aggressive where they are hunted than when they are protected. That hunting bears gives them a greater respect for people also contradicts logic. While it makes sense for animals to submit to dominants, so long as submission increases safety, submission to a predator would be suicidal."
That quote right there is one of the most profound statements on the subject that I've ever read. If you'll recall, I theorized in an earlier post that our hunting bears to keep them afraid of us was actually showing ourselves to be dangerous to an animal that is programmed to eliminate danger. This goes with that same line of thinking, only taking it one step further to indicate that we are showing ourselves to be predators, something to definitely NOT be respected or tolerated. That could go a long way in answering the "why" that always comes up as a result of a bear attack.
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