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| Above, a mother bear and cub in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Armand Vaquer. |
The following doesn't apply to me (I have two cats), but I have relatives with RVs who camp with their dogs.
That is camping with the family dog in bear country. RV Travel posted an article on the fact that dogs can, and do, initiate conflicts with bears in campgrounds.
They begin with:
If you camp in bear country with a dog, you might figure Fido gives you an early-warning system. After all, he’ll probably smell or hear a bear long before you do.
A new study suggests you might not want to count on that.
Researchers examined 326 human-bear conflicts involving domestic dogs across North America. Dogs initiated 54% of those conflicts, according to the study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management.
And don’t count on your dog to sound the alarm. Dogs warned their owners about a bear in only 9.2% of the conflicts studied.
This isn’t just a backcountry-hiking problem, either. While 45.1% of the conflicts occurred while people were hiking in wilderness areas, 35.3% happened in front-country settings.
For RVers traveling with dogs, that’s an important distinction.
To read more, go here.
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