Being a Bear Smart community means Whistler is committed to incorporating long-term bear smart practices into the community’s waste infrastructure, educational programs and resident lifestyles. However, many challenges still exist and the major ongoing contributor to human-bear conflict is human carelessness with bear attractants around homes, workplaces, and vehicles. Attractants include garbage, recycling, compost, pet food, fruit trees, and even petroleum products, among other things. A bear only needs to obtain a food reward once to become conditioned to human foods and consequently, set down a path that can lead to eventual destruction.  

As a community, Whistler wants to avoid all preventable bear deaths. Unfortunately, in spite of collaborative bear management issues, there continue to be human-bear conflicts, habituation of bears, and preventable bear deaths every year. Monitoring the number of bears destroyed by the Conservation Officer Service each year provides a measure of how we are doing, as a Community, at controlling our attractants and the subsequent number of bears that are lured down a deadly path. Through each of us adopting proper waste management practices we can protect Whistler’s resident bear population.