Proposed legislation by the California State Assembly has re-floated an environmental topic oft visited over the years: the increasing overlap of humans and black bears, and what to do about it.
Assembly Bill 1038 was recently authored and put forth by State Assemblywoman Heather Hadwick, whose district spans the entire northeast region of California, down south to just past South Lake Tahoe and Eldorado National Forest. The bill recommends reintroducing the use of dogs in pursuit of, but not to injure or kill, bears during certain seasons, as well as allowing the Department of Fish and Wildlife to establish the use of dogs during bear hunting season if it so desires.
In Nevada, dogs are legally allowed to be used to pursue bears and mountain lions during the appropriate seasons (Sept. 1 to Dec. 1 for bears, March 1 to end of February for mountain lions) and with the correct tags. Further, Nevada Department of Wildlife biologists use dogs to assist in hazing bears.
“It’s a pretty no-nonsense bill,” Hadwick said. “We’re not changing hunting quotas or harvest limits … It’s for hazing, not for hunting. It doesn’t create a hunting season or anything, doesn’t mandate a hunting season. It would just give CDFW the opportunity to bring dogs back for hunting if they wanted to. We really want to keep bears wild.”
On April 29, the bill went before the state’s Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee. Support and opposition were divided between many hunting, sport, and law enforcement groups (in support) and animal and environmental groups (in opposition). After the bill did not gain enough backing to proceed, short by one vote, Vice Chair Jeff Gonzalez requested reconsideration, meaning the bill will be revisited in committee in 2026.
According to Hadwick’s chief of staff, Casey Dunn, the plan is to continue rallying support between now and then.
It’s a little bit of tough love, and it’s a pretty short-term uncomfortable experience for the bear, but it’s for a lifelong lesson.”
~ Becca Carniello, NDOW urban wildlife biologist
Those in opposition to the bill claim its passage would open the door for “carnage,” setting sights on animals who “should be able to live in peace, take care of their young, and survive,” as put by Ann Bryant, CEO of the Bear League, a Tahoe-based nonprofit.
The Bear League, as well as other environmental and animal welfare groups against the bill, point to a 2011 survey by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research, in which 83% of California voters opposed the practice of bear hounding. The poll was quickly followed by the 2012 passage of Senate Bill 1221, which made it unlawful to use dogs when hunting big game.
“What [AB 1038] is, plain and simple, is a way to bring back hounding for the hunt,” Bryant said. “That door was shut in 2012. We want it to main remain shut, closed, bolted, and sealed up forever. We are not going to take any chances in allowing this to even be opened in the slightest.”
State of bears in the bear state
It was 101 years ago that the last known grizzly bear was spotted in California, in Sequoia National Park. The species’ statewide extinction came about due to human/grizzly conflicts, habitat loss, and hunting for sport or capture to be used in bear and bull fights.
Though the feature animal of the California state flag is no longer reported to roam the lands, the grizzly’s cousin, the black bear, continues to do so.
AB 1038’s timing is augmented by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Black Bear Conservation and Management Plan, released April 14. Particularly notable is the department’s estimation of 59,851 black bears (with 90% probability) living in the state. This number is a significant hike since CDFW’s last bear management plan, released in 1998, which estimated between 17,000 and 23,000 black bears to be living across California — though such a rise, CDFW claims, has more to do with contemporary methodology than an actual increase in the population.
What’s more, that 60,000 number has been roughly the same for a while. “We believe the black bear population to be stable for the past 10 years or so,” CDFW information officer Peter Tira wrote in an email to Moonshine, “though we also know black bears have expanded their range into new parts of California — notably into Modoc County and north of the San Francisco Bay Area.”
Determination of the count comes from advanced methods, technology, and scientific tools: “We now have 130 GPS-collared black bears in the state providing data,” Tira explained. “We’re using fecal DNA analysis, hair snares, den checks, and other methods to arrive at these populations estimates, which no doubt will be refined regionally over time with more data.”
Bryant questions such a large number. “The population claims are completely off the charts bizarre and have no basis in reality,” she said. “There’s never been a [population] study done in California. Never. They pull a tooth here and there and they try and grab some hair. What’s that going to tell you? Nothing. They have no clue how many bears there are.”
In some cases, she added, individual bears pictured on camera don’t distinguish well and might be counted multiple times.
Bryant said she wants to see a formal bear population study done, which would be a costly but necessary effort. “We don’t know how many bears are in California,” she said, “but you can’t just throw out that there’s 60,000 … and then decide you’re going to start hounding them.”
To this allegation, Tira said he would argue the advancing methodologies currently underway counts as such a study.
While some question CDFW’s count, there is general consensus over a rise in human/black bear interactions.
“It used to be very rare to see a bear,” said Hadwick, who grew up in Siskiyou County and now lives in Modoc County. “I have friends that are game wardens that used to see a bear once a year. Now they see them every day … I’ve seen more bears in the last 3 years than I have my entire life.”
More than 1,000 human/bear encounters have been reported to CDFW each year since 2017. The Tahoe Basin is a hot spot for such interactions. Reasons behind this rise, the department states in its bear management plan, is an “increasing spatial overlap between people and black bears (i.e., increased human development and recreation in black bear habitat and expansion of black bear distribution).”
Much overlapping involves human food and garbage, and a lack of education on proper storage. A recent incident revealed just how deadly, though extremely rare, this can be. In 2023, 71-year-old Patrice Miller was killed in her Downieville home by a male black bear. It was the first-ever reported human fatality caused by a black bear in California. Reports revealed Miller would leave cat food on her porch to attract local ferals, and this could have been what drew the bear.
“Bears are getting more comfortable with us, they’re comfortable enough to hibernate right under our feet,” Bryant said. “They are evolving much faster, much quicker around our presence than humans will ever be able to do around them, because we hold fear and misconceptions and laziness. We don’t do what we need to [to] avoid having a problem. People feed them and people won’t lock up their trash, and they want to put the bird feeders out.”
Educational resources like the Bear League, county websites, and BearWise explain what it takes to be bear aware, including securing garbage, never approaching or feeding bears, and cleaning grills and smokers. Further, there are tips for bear-resistant barriers (like electric fences and unwelcome mats) and deterrents to keep bears out of buildings.
Dog and bear
Hadwick and other proponents of AB 1038 allege current deterrents aren’t enough and, through AB 1038, are pressing for more “proactive” methods to keep bears out of towns.
Currently, when a bear exhibits undesirable behavior, such as property damage or accessing improperly contained human food, hazing will be utilized. These techniques, such as pyrotechnics, noise makers, and paintball guns, are meant to immediately modify the bear’s behavior.
CDFW implemented its Lake Tahoe Basin Black Bear “Trap/Tag/Haze” Pilot Management Program in 2022 and continues this work today. In this program, bears showing habituated behaviors “such as raiding trash cans, breaking in cars or houses, or entering campsites” are captured, tagged, then released under hazing conditions. From there, “the department will evaluate the data from the trap/tag/haze project … to determine if the management methods show an indication of deterring habituated behaviors or not.”
Tira told the Ink the trap/tag/haze program is scheduled to take place this spring and summer in state parks and popular campgrounds prior to their opening to the public. Since its start, Tira added, “We now have a robust and growing DNA database of 343 individual Tahoe bears.”
Dogs are often utilized as another bear-hazing technique across the world — more specifically, Karelian bear dogs. This canine breed is recognized by the American Kennel Club as “bred to hunt large, aggressive game by himself, his build reflects his duties. He is a silent hunter, and only barks once the game is stopped or treed. Working with an experienced hunter, he communicates the type of animal he has located by the sound of his bark.”
“We are considering them,” Tira said. “We’ve had biologists use them in the past in Lake Tahoe. They were personal dogs belonging to one individual biologist who no longer is in that role. Nevada joins us with its Karelian bear dogs on trap/tag/haze efforts when their availability allows.”
Dogs can be used to haze bears in California if done for scientific research purposes.
Across the Basin, Karelians have been utilized by NDOW staff since 2001 as non-lethal management tools to haze black bears — one of the first state agencies to do so in the U.S.
“These dogs are really special because they don’t want to attack the bears,” furthered Becca Carniello, an NDOW urban wildlife biologist and human companion to Badger, her 3-year-old Karelian bear dog. “My co-bear biologist [Carl Lackey, who has two Karelian bear dogs] always puts it best: They’re not trying to attack the bear. It’s really the happiness of pursuit.”
Ninety-nine percent of Carniello’s job is with the black bear population; the remaining 1% is for mountain lions or bucks. She first began her work with black bears during her undergrad, working on a genetics project for the species. This led to a position with CDFW, researching the bears in Modoc County. After a stint as a biologist in the Bay Area, including work with bobcats, she began her position with NDOW.
“I never really liked working with other species as much as I liked working with bears,” she told Moonshine. “I was actually of bears, growing up … [Now] I definitely have a healthy respect for them. I go into crawl spaces with them and everything.”
At NDOW, Carniello’s (and Badger’s) interactions with black bears are for research or human/bear conflict. “The work can look differently depending on the day, but I’ll do site visits … [and] lots of education,” she said. “We go to community events and elementary schools and high schools and give lots of presentations, too.”
The dogs come into play if people are crowding a black bear and danger could develop, if there’s a bear in a house, or if there’s a bear wandering a beach with lots of people. However, if a crawl space is too tight, for example, for a dog to enter, a paintball gun (the balls filled with capsaicin or baby powder) will be used to flush the bear out. Yelling, too, is an oft-used method.
Mostly, however, Carniello explained, she utilizes Badger when NDOW is preparing to release a captured bear. Upon release, the dogs — ideally multiple, though one is still effective — chase the bear away.
A 2018 dissertation titled Spatial and temporal patterns of a generalist urban carnivore; American black bears (Ursus americanus) at Lake Tahoe (CA) described the method: “Specifically, prior to release, an object (e.g., rock or branch) was placed 20 to 30 feet from the trap and functioned as a visual cue such that the dogs were let loose when the bear reached this marked location. This translated into giving the bear a 2- to 5-second head start, after which the two dogs initiated their chase. The dogs barked and nipped at the bear and often forced bears to retreat to a tree.” At that point, the dogs would be called back.
The idea behind employing dogs in this way, Carniello said, is turning positive experiences the bear had (for example, gaining access to human food) into negative ones. “It’s a little bit of tough love, and it’s a pretty short-term uncomfortable experience for the bear, but it’s for a lifelong lesson,” she said.
The dissertation noted the effectiveness of Karelian bear dogs hazing black bears. “In my study, treatment with dogs kept bears away from the capture and release sites for the longest period of time, which was consistent with other studies,” author Jan Mario Kornelis Klip wrote. “Dogs also had the greatest effect on all behavioral proxies examined and bears treated with dogs seemed to become more nocturnal, less winter active, and spent less time in urban areas. These impacts of bear behavior may ultimately reduce the level of conflict with humans.”
Gone huntin’
While heavy emphasis has been placed on the hazing aspect of AB 1038, the mention of the possible reintroduction of dogs (any dogs, not specifically Karelian bear dogs) to pursue bears during hunting is no issue at all with state wildlife biologists and intelligent, sensible state employees using trained KBDs to try and encourage bears to avoid human habitat,” Bryant said. “The houndsmen who would benefit from a bill such as AB 1038 are nothing of the sort and clearly have ulterior motives nothing like those of wildlife biologists and state employees who are legitimately concerned for the well-being of the bears. It’s impossible to speak of the two in the same context.”
Between 2006 and 2011, there were 192 reported incidents in California involving dogs and bears or bobcats. Examples included poaching, abandoned bear carcasses, and the mutilation of cubs.
A bill analysis of AB 1038 by the Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee noted, “Because the dogs are often out of sight of the hunter, there is the potential for violations of several … laws including: 1) trespassing on private property; 2) pursuit of a big game mammal during the closed season on such mammal; 3) pursuit of a fully protected, rare, or endangered mammal; and 4) pursuit of any mammal in a game refuge or ecological preserve if hunting within that refuge or preserve is unlawful.”
Bryant shared one example of a dog going rogue around bears in Tahoe several years ago: “A mama bear just came out of the natal den with her one little cub. He was probably, oh, maybe 10 pounds. And a dog grabbed him and shook him and broke his neck and killed him right in front of people. So can you imagine packs of hounds?”
Hadwick, a hunter herself, said she’s aware of standout bad examples but cautions that there are those in every sector. “I have family that raises hounds … I’ve been around it a lot,” she said. “I don’t have the same fear in it as the Bear League, but I understand and respect their passion for it.”
A Tahoe Basin resident who asked to remain anonymous due to harassment he’s received over the years for hunting bear, said he has friends who enjoy running dogs while hunting. “It’s a huge benefit because when you have them treed, you get up there and say, ‘Okay, that’s a 4-year-old bear. I’m not looking to harvest that. We’ll let that one go.’ You’re targeting specific age groups and sex of the animal … There’s a lot of benefit to that.”
This individual has hunted black bear just outside of the Basin (hunting is prohibited within the Tahoe Basin), and said he enjoys eating the meat after reporting his harvest to CDFW. He doesn’t hunt as much in California anymore, however, because of rising restrictions and inundation of people in the backcountry.
CDFW’s bear management plan spells this out: “Recreational trapping was prohibited in 1961, the bag limit was reduced to one in 1968, harvest of cubs or females with cubs was prohibited in 1972, a quota limiting the number of black bears harvested annually was initiated in 1990, and the use of dogs to hunt black bears was prohibited in 2013.”
Statewide interest in hunting has declined since the 1970s; while California is reported to have the largest black bear population in the contiguous United States, it also has one of the lowest harvest rates of black bears.
The table above breaks down annual harvest rates of different bear hunting and non-hunting regions across California. As shown, the Northern Sierra region, which includes Truckee/North Tahoe, sees a 2.1% to 3.5% harvest rate of black bears each year. CDFW reports the maximum sustainable annual hunting rate for black bears to be nearly 16%.
“As a society, we’re busier than we used to be,” Hadwick said. “We used to make time for those things, and not everybody does now. And the cost is a lot, but I also think that people sometimes don’t understand that all of that money that hunting puts into the state for those tags goes back to conservation. And that’s a huge chunk of how we conserve and manage our wildlife.”
Over the past decade, the purchase of black bear tags has generated a total of $13.3 million to CDFW. On top of that, federal taxes on firearms and ammunition sales generate between $10 million and $30 million for wildlife and wildlife habitat conservation.
Per the bill analysis, research shows that “hunting does impact black bear populations and could alter [human-bear conflict, or] HBC, but there is no guarantee that it would decrease black bear population or decrease HBC … Data from Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario all demonstrated an increase in nuisance complaints upon an increase in bear harvest. Research in other regions revealed no correlation between bears harvested and the number of HBC incidents the subsequent year.”
Hazing and aversive conditioning, however, have been shown to reduce human-bear conflicts.
An adjacent hazing effort is found in Senate Bill 818, which is making its way through California Legislature and proposes a 5-year pilot program in El Dorado County known as “Tree and Free.” The program would allow permitted private hound people to haze mountain lions considered a public safety threat.
While the Bear League sees AB 1038 falling short of advancement as a victory, Bryant says it and other wildlife nonprofits are already planning to continue their united front against the bill.
As for Hadwick and her team, the plan is to continue bill education with the hope of change down the road. “That’s the hard part about these bills, right?” she said. “If they shoot this bill down, my district’s the one that has to deal with it. And it’s only going to get worse. We have to do something, this is a proactive approach with minimal harm.”
