Below is a chart produced by the IBA's Bear Specialist Group on approaches to dealing with human-bear conflict. 1) Educating the public provides a base (but has its limitations and is in general, ineffective). 2) You can educate bears by teaching them acceptable behavior, hazing (short term), aversive conditioning (long-term). 3) You can manage bears (trapping and relocating, or killing, either as nuisances or by increased hunting). 4) By far the largest chunk in approaches is being pro-active by preventing problems (removing human-provided foods, i.e. trash, bird feeders, fruit).

One major roadblock we have in our approach locally is that in the time we're taking to reduce attractants, i.e. trash, bird feeders, etc. we are continuously training new bears, including young bears, on how to utilize human-provided foods - ensuring that problems will be ongoing.

An example: The very next morning after a bear was destroyed in town for biting a resident in July, a new bear was at the same location getting into trash.