State Police shot and killed a bear near Eddy and Washington Streets in Newton early Sunday.The bear was in a tree along the westbound side of the Mass Pike, WBZ reports
UPDATE: Someone posted this video on YouTube..
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Incredibly sad. Have we not evolved to the point of sparing the life of an innocent animal who wandered into the wrong neighborhood? Does expedience trump trying every humane technique ? Barbaric!
I don’t like to second guess police in the performance of their duty, but their behavior in this instance certainly warrants review. It’s hard to believe the training afforded Department of Environmental Affairs Police does not anticipate this type of occurrence and provide a non-lethal method for removing a treed bear. I’d take little issue with the DEAP’s actions if the bear presented an immediate threat to the public, but from the report that does not appear to be the case. If the bear was in the tree and they were concerned it might fall onto the Mass Pike presenting a hazard to motorists, shooting the bear seems like exactly the wrong thing to do.
Terrible.
The Boston.com story has more details….
How awful all around.
Except for the qualiity of the amateur news footage, which was very impressive.
This is too much like the debacle last year in Brookline. The MEP needs better training in handling bear incidents, which are only going to increase. Very sad.
They also need to learn more about communicating with the public. Using “euthanize” in a situation like this is double-speak. Euthanasia is used for sick or dying animals to give them a peaceful end. Killing an animal who you are worried about for non-medical reasons may be justifiable in some cases, but is not euthanasia.
So the justification for killing the bear was that it might fall on the Mass Pike. Well, lots of moose and deer run across roads and highways and may have encounters with motorists. Should be “euthanize” them too?
What a sad and awful thing. It is very hard to imagine what could justify this response.
With habitat loss pushing ever more wildlife into human-inhabited areas, we have to learn ways to coexist safely (and better train public safety officials). How can we teach our kids to care about polar bears’ shrinking habitat if we choose deadly force as soon as a black bear wanders across our city limits?
I don’t think it’s fair to make judgements on a 2 minute clip. Lisa, if the beer was hanging over the turnpike and it fell, don’t you think it would be likely to cause an incidents where there would be casualties? It sucks, but stuff happens. I’d rather have a dead beer than dead people.
And dont you think that it might have died from the fall after it was sedated? The bear was pretty high up there and he would most certainly have been injured if not killed in the fall. It’s sad for sure but what is really sad is these animals are being pushed into the cities because their habitat is being taken over for development. And lets just wonder what might have happened if he came down on his own and charged the large group of people watching him. There is no good answer here except it seems to me it was the safest thing to do for the bear and the public. IMHO
Tom, I did not and will not watch the video because I don’t have the stomach to watch this. As for whether it could cause casualties, anything can be within the realm of possible, but we make decisions on probabilities not possibilities. What is the probability that a bear sitting a tree is going to suddenly fall out of the tree onto the Mass Pike? Now, I’ve read about a bear that was tranquilized and fell out of a tree – it survived the fall only to be later hit by cars when it tried staggering back to town. The Mass. Environmental Police weren’t able to tranquilize it and without the tranquilizer it really doesn’t sound like a very great risk that the bear was going to tumble onto a passing motorist.
Plus, there are plenty of areas where wild life cross streets and highways but we don’t engage in a wholesale slaughter of those animals on the possibility that someone might collide with the animal and get hurt. And mark my words, if you do collide with a moose you will almost surely die. Strike a deer on the highway and you will very probably die. That’s why roads have warnings in areas where wild life frequently cross. I have a hunch that in this case it was a matter of expedience and the fastest way to resolve the issue was destroying the bear. That makes me sad.
Is everyone ok now? I mean, they said the bear was near Shaw’s market. If the bear walked into Shaw’s he would see a few hundred pounds of meats harvested for human consumption, non of which posed any threat to man nor beast. But on his way out, he bumps into a kid and a little doggie… Barbaric? Explain?
According to WBUR, the bear meat will be “salvaged.”
There can’t possibly be more than 30 lbs of eatable meat there. Serve bear at Rosie’s Place and see the outrage.
This is incredibly sad. The bear was very high in that tree. If it had been tranquilized and fell from that height, it may have suffered an even more painful death.
This report WBZ-TV tonight and the story in the Globe reported that tranquilizers were used (but failed).
But this note appears ontop the WBUR story…
Is the correction to make it more plausible that undoped kill would be allowed to be distributed to charity? That part (distributing kill to charity) is total media spin. If they brought it to MCI-Framingham, the health dept would throw it out
Then again, the person who posted this photo believes they used tranquilizers
The bear wasn’t going to fall onto the Mass Pike. It fell onto the train tracks.
A similar incident occurred in Brookline last year, and will likely become more common because of the proximity of humans to the bears’ shrinking habitat.
This happened literally around the corner from our house on the north side of the Pike in West Newton. Our neighborhood has increasingly had problems with coyotes, and at the city’s invitation, the Mass. Dept. of Wildlife came to a community meeting to explain the laws protecting wildlife and how to cope with wild animals encroaching on suburban neighborhoods (or suburban areas encroaching on wildlife habitats depending on your point of view).
I will look into having someone from the state come to the community to discuss this event so that we can all understand what happened and what we can do in the future to avoid conflicts with bears.
Newton police say
Clearly, they want no part of the public relations fallout from how this was handled.
@Ted. Wild animals in our neighborhoods could be an ominous warning. Last year I read an abridged edition of Gibbon “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.
(There was no way I was going to try and go through the entire 10 volume set.) There was one short entry (almost an aside) that described how wild animals began entering Rome in droves as the Empire began to unravel. Jared Diamond, in his book “Collapse” also touches on the how both environmental degradation and over development contributed to the Empire’s demise.
@Bob, now you’re scaring me. Cut it out. 😉
… how long before we have a dedicated eastbound lane on the Pike for all the wildlife streaming in from the Berkshires? Petition your legislators now – No EZ-Pass’es for Bears!!
@Hoss Yes, barbaric! It’s a wild west move to shoot animals rather than tranquilize and relocate.
@Ted Was this really a conflict with a bear? This bear climbed a tree in fear in an upscale neighborhood and the alleged experts chose killing as their only option.
@Ingelosi, I am not sure what you mean by an “upscale” neighborhood. This is actually a CDBG target neighborhood, which means it is eligible for federal funds because of the number of low to moderate income households. I would characterize the neighborhood as densely populated, with mostly two-family houses on fairly small lots, abutting a busy street (Washington Street, with two lanes of traffic going both ways), right next to the railroad tracks, which are separate Washington Street by a narrow berm and a chain link fence through most of this area. There is a lot of foot traffic: school children walk this way on their way to Newton North everyday, and commuters wait for the express bus to Boston in the shade of this tree. There are also a lot of businesses nearby, like Trader Joes, the auto dealers, Oakley Spa, etc., which attract both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
While this occurred on a Sunday morning, it caused a lot of commotion and my colleague, Anthony Salvucci, who lives on Eddy Street, told me there were neighbors, police and others standing around the area and the street had to be closed to traffic so the DEAP could deal with the bear. Nor am I aware that the bear climbed the tree in fear. It appears that he was traveling along the railroad line and may well have climbed up into the tree to rest. So, yeah, absolutely, there was a distinct possibility of a bear coming into contact with people in this area. I’ve seen plenty of bears growing up in the sticks, where they are more of a nuisance than a threat (eating garbage, breaking into houses and sheds looking for food, leaving bear scat around), but I am not used to seeing them in a densely populated urban/suburban area where there are many more people and cars that are much harder for bears to avoid.
So I am going to reserve judgment on how well the DEAP performed their duties until I know all the facts.