Study: Body Cameras on Bears do not Reduce Bear Violence
Outfitting bears with body cameras started as a policy created in the hope of reducing bear violence. Advocates felt that if the bears knew their actions would be recorded, they might not go around slaying thousands of people every day. But adding the devices has had disastrous effects and has not lowered bear brutality in any perceivable way.
Even worse, every time a technician attempts to place a camera on a bear they are killed. This has actually increased the overall death rate. Recently, robots have been used to outfit the bears with the devices, but those are destroyed by the bears as well and costs billions of dollars to replace. Trying to retrieve the cameras back off of the bears has proven even more difficult and so far, no one has dared try.
The videos that have been retrieved wirelessly are largely useless because the lens is covered in filth or blood almost instantly.
The foundation for reducing bear violence, who headed the initiative to put body cameras on bears, has admitted defeat now that an official study shows that the expensive undertaking hasn’t helped anyone at all. “I wanted to believe in a world where bears possessed some sense of shame,” said founder Mark Drechsel. “I believed in that world once, but those days are over now.”
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