Bear Trouble final web transcript Lizzie Peabody: Hey Sidedoorables, Lizzie here. While Sidedoor is on summer break, we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from other podcasts we think you’ll love. Today’s story comes from Points North, a show from Interlochen Public Radio that explores the land, water, and people of the Great Lakes. (But you can enjoy these stories from anywhere in the world.) This episode starts with a black bear attack in the dead of winter. Already strange, since bears are supposed to be hibernating… but what follows is even more wild. I won’t give it away. But if you liked our episode - Zoo’s Clues - with veterinarian Kali Holder, I think you’ll really enjoy this story. Okay, here’s Bear Trouble, from Points North. Dan Wanschura: One morning, about a week before Christmas, Bill Vagts steps outside to sweep some snow off his porch. And his little corgi, Darla, comes with him. Bill Vagts: I was headed out just to enjoy the morning, sort of. And of course, when I go out, she always wants to go with me, so ... Dan: So Darla runs out into the fenced yard, and wanders behind the car in the driveway. Bill Vagts: I kind of was looking the other way, sweeping. And all of a sudden, she just bolted past me. She was pretty hysterical. Dan: Just barking loud and fast. Bill walks toward her, when all of a sudden something hits his leg. A black bear runs right past him and jumps on Darla. Bill Vagts: All that bear had in his brain was to get that dog and eat it. And he was chewing on her stomach and on her back, and it was at that point that I just reacted. Dan: Bill had encountered black bears before; he lived in Isabella in the north woods of Minnesota, near the Boundary Waters. But never something like this. Without thinking, he runs over to the bear, grabs its neck, and pulls it off Darla. Bill Vagts: I shouldn't have done that. It's total reflex reaction. And Darla was still good enough to be able to run, get out of there and run off. Dan: And then Bill is frozen there with a black bear in a headlock. And everything stands still for a moment. He's not scared. He doesn't think to let go. The only thing that crosses his mind is one random thought about the bear. Bill Vagts: I looked down at his fur, and in my brain for some reason, I went, "Boy, these bears are really black." Dan: And then the bear reacts. Bill Vagts: He finally figured out that somebody, something, had him around the neck, and then he turned and bit. Dan: Right in Bill's stomach. Bill instantly lets go of the bear and turns away. Bill Vagts: All I was thinking is get Darla up on the deck and get myself in the cabin. And when I turned around, the bear had left, he was just gone. Dan: The bear had taken off toward another house, where it was about to find two more unsuspecting people. This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I'm Dan Wanschura. Dan: That winter day in 2017, Bill Vagts was understandably preoccupied as he wrestled this bear, so he didn't have time to question how weird it was. Why was this bear behaving so strangely, so aggressively, when the chances of being struck by lightning are higher than being attacked by a black bear? Today, we try to solve that mystery. Ellie Katz takes it from here. Ellie Katz: A few houses down the road from Bill and Darla, two contractors are finishing up their morning coffee break. Dan Boedeker and Gary Jerich didn't want to be recorded for this story. But I spoke to them on the phone. Ellie: The two guys were putting siding on a garage, when Dan sees something coming up behind Gary. At first he thinks it's a big black dog. Here's Dan. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources interviewed him in 2017. [ARCHIVE CLIP, Dan Boedeker: I turned around and looked, and Gary was walking away from me, and this bear was on his ass, right on his ass. I mean, nose to ass, it's right there.] Ellie: Dan starts yelling, "bear!" And Gary runs. [ARCHIVE CLIP, Dan Boedeker: So he took off running, and the bear went running after him.] Ellie: The bear lunges at Gary, and Dan looks around for something to hit it with. He grabs a level and swings. He misses, but he gets the bear's attention. Then the bear turns to him. Dan slips and falls, and all of a sudden, he's on the snowy ground, with a black bear on top of him. [ARCHIVE CLIP, Dan Boedeker: I was kicking at him. I was laying on my back.] Ellie: The bear bites Dan's knee, his foot. Gary is still on his feet pumping with adrenaline. He swings a piece of siding and misses. The bear sinks its teeth into Dan's forearm. Gary swings a sawhorse and the bear turns back to him. As it comes towards him, Gary smacks it with a shovel as hard as he can. The bear falls down, dazed, and the two guys run to their work van nearby. The bear follows them as they back out of the driveway. Ellie: Dan and Gary made it to the hospital. Both of their clothes were torn up by the bear. Dan had several deep puncture wounds. He got 22 stitches in his right arm. He still has the scars, but he was okay. He told me he was afraid of bear attacks for a while after that. He started carrying a gun; he'd look over his shoulder in the woods. Now he recognizes it was a freak accident. And his last words in the interview with the conservation officer sum it up pretty well. [ARCHIVE CLIP, Dan Boedeker: Never underestimate a bear.] Ellie: While Dan was getting treated at the hospital, Gary went back to the scene with some conservation officers from the Minnesota DNR. The officers followed the bear's tracks through the snow, until they found it alive about 250 yards away. Andy Tri: And they just found it lying on top of the snow. It was kind of curled up. Ellie: This is Andy Tri. He's a wildlife biologist at the Minnesota DNR. Gary's smack with the shovel did some damage?the bear was clearly in a lot of pain. And the officers immediately shot and killed it. Andy actually wasn't there, but he got a phone call in the field telling him what had happened. Andy Tri: It just seemed like a crazy incident, to be perfectly frank. You know, bear attacks are so rare, it just seemed like a?like an odd thing. Ellie: Since the '80s, there have only been about 15 unprovoked bear attacks that resulted in hospitalization in Minnesota. Andy Tri: Zero had happened in winter, as far as I'm aware. Ellie: Andy did a quick examination of the bear's body to see if anything might explain what happened. Andy Tri: You know, everything really seemed normal with this bear, at least from first appearances. It looked like a normal, healthy bear. Ellie: So you guys were just kind of a little bit stumped. Andy Tri: Truly. Truly stumped. Ellie: So they sent the bear to a diagnostic lab where a vet could do a full necropsy, open the bear up and see what was going on. And what the vet found, Andy said he never would've predicted. That's after the break. *** Dan: For just $5 a month, you too can join the Points North Fan Club. We'll send you a cool Points North beanie and bumper sticker and some other fun stuff. Sign up today at PointsNorthPodcast.org/fanclub. And thanks. Ellie: Dr. Anibal Armien spends most of his days looking at diseased animals. Like, truly any animal that's ever been sick: dogs, geese, toads, bald eagles, bats, dolphins. So you'd think a veterinary pathologist like him might have a penchant for the morbid. Anibal Armien: Maybe not, actually. We like?we love life. It's just that we are kind of like fascinated by how things got wrong. [laughs] Ellie: Armien was a vet pathologist at the University of Minnesota when the bear attack happened. And it was his job to autopsy this bear. The first thing everyone wanted to know was: Did this bear have rabies? And did the people it attacked need to get treated? It was the likeliest explanation for what happened. Anibal Armien: And that needed to be ruled out, basically, as soon as possible. Ellie: But the tests came back negative. Which led to the big question: What caused this bear to act so bizarrely? Was it habituated to humans? Was it sick? Armien looked around for any clues. Anibal Armien: Lungs, heart, gastrointestinal tract, liver, kidney. Ellie: Everything was normal. And then he got to the brain. This brain was not normal. It was inflamed—so inflamed that in some areas the brain had probably been pressing against the bear's skull when it was alive. That brain inflammation is called encephalitis. In this case, it was probably caused by a herpes virus. Anibal Armien: I was very surprised, because this type of encephalitis was never reported. Ellie: To his knowledge, this was the first time this had been found in bears. And what Armien noticed was that the brain was inflamed in areas related to emotions and memory and circadian rhythms. That's when things started to click: This could make the bear act in random ways. ARMIEN: The areas that were affected in the brain absolutely could bring the animal to an abnormal behavior. What is the abnormal behavior is not possible to predict, but based on the clinical history or the history of the incident, we assume that the bear basically was not even reacting or responding as?like a bear. Ellie: That day in Isabella, Minnesota, the inflammation in the bear's brain made it aggressive. The DNR and the public had their answers about the bear's behavior, but we still didn't know how this bear had gotten sick. A couple years later, Armien took a job as a pathologist at the University of California-Davis. And when he got there, he learned about something totally unexpected. ARMIEN: And for my surprise, I came in and there was already concern about how bears were presenting encephalitis in the state. Ellie: The same thing he saw in Minnesota was happening in black bears in California and Nevada: brain inflammation, and bears acting not like bears usually act. Armien was stunned. The encephalitic bears out west would just walk right up to people, like a dog would. Like, there's a video of a guy on a snowboard at a resort near Lake Tahoe. A small bear comes right up to him and starts sniffing his legs. [ARCHIVE CLIP: Coming back, Smokey? Sorry, dude. You see him bite my glove?] [ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah.] [ARCHIVE CLIP: Whatcha doin'?] Ellie: Then it just waddles away, looking disoriented and kind of unsteady. Sometimes other bears have muscle tremors, or drag their back feet. To try to explain how these bears got sick out west and in Minnesota, Armien and a number of other scientists have come up with a few different theories. And to understand those, we gotta zoom out a little bit. On the whole, black bears in North America are doing pretty well. Here's Minnesota wildlife biologist Andy Tri again. Andy Tri: There's more black bears now in North America than all other species of bears combined worldwide. They're truly a conservation success story. We have bears in places we haven't had for 200 years. Ellie: But their habitat has changed?we've built roads, cut down trees for farmland. And instead of uninterrupted stretches of bear habitat, it's patchier now, more fragmented. And because of all that, we're living in closer proximity to bears. They'll venture into farms, backyards and garbage cans for food. Which leads us to our first theory: this could help the spread of disease. Ellie: Armien thinks maybe pathogens from humans, and more importantly, our domestic animals, are making wildlife sicker. Andy, the biologist, sees some evidence of this in the bears he studies when he screens them for disease. Andy Tri: They're showing exposure to distemper and exposure to rabies and exposure to toxoplasmosis. Ellie: Canine distemper is a virus we vaccinate dogs for. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that often affects domestic cats. There have also been a handful of bears with bird flu, which often comes from domestic poultry flocks. Andy Tri: The only way they would be catching a lot of those things is through contact. You know, without question, some of these diseases just didn't occur in the wildlife populations prior to contact with humans and their pets and that sort of thing. Ellie: Another theory is that more bears squeezed into less space makes it easier for disease to spread. Anibal Armien: Many diseases, especially viral diseases, are favored by density. Ellie: Which brings us to a third theory: Maybe bears are just more stressed out since they're competing for less space and they're living next to humans. Maybe that stress makes them more susceptible to disease. Ellie: And there's other theories too. Like maybe these diseases have always existed in bears, and we're just starting to notice. Or maybe there are just more diseases spreading amongst animals and humans in the world because of things like the exotic animal trade and climate change. Ellie: All of this leads us back to one big fat question: Do more sick animals mean more dangerous encounters with humans. Maybe? We don't know that yet either. But the one thing everyone agrees on is we are altering the world, and that's affecting the health of wild animals. Armien and others argue one really good way to keep everything healthier is by protecting wild places. Anibal Armien: Basically, the best form of defense for all of these problems, I will say, is conservation, preservation. Wildlife have to have their own space where they can interact normally, free. And we have to respect that, yeah? Ellie: Bill Vagts, the guy who wrestled the bear in Minnesota, is on board with that idea. His injuries from the bear attack were pretty minimal: he had two superficial puncture wounds from the bear's teeth in his stomach. Same thing with Darla, his corgi, just on her back. And she's still alive and well. Every once in a while, Bill thinks about what happened, but it doesn't weigh on him too much. Bill Vagts: It was never something that I was like, "Oh my gosh, you know, I could have been killed," or anything like that. No, never. I do know I'm very lucky. Ellie: Bill didn't see the bear again, except a photo of it after it was dead. Bill Vagts: The bear, you know, was laying in the snow. He looked smaller, you know, lifeless. Yeah, sad, kind of. Ellie: Yeah, why?why did it make you feel sad? Bill Vagts: Well, I don't?I just?you know, I've done?did a lot of hunting and fishing in my youth and, you know, the older you get, the more you just like to see things alive. Ellie: The north woods were Bill's home. But it was that bear's home, too. He wouldn't change that. Dan: That episode was produced by Ellie Katz. It was edited by Morgan Springer. Additional editing by Michael Livingston and me, Dan Wanschura. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Matthew Mikkelsen of Hayloft Audio. Dan: If you're not signed up for our brand new Points North newsletter, you are missing out. We send one out every other week to keep you updated on what we're working on, along with some other Great Lakes news. Sign up at PointsNorthPodcast.org. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram. We're @PointsNorthPodcast. Points North is a production of Interlochen Public Radio. -30-