Hey, if you’ve never interacted with an actual wild animal before and you are visiting a National Park and seeing one for the first time here’s a helpful little guidebook for you:
- Yes that is an actual wild animal.
- No it doesn’t behave like your dog, and because you are inexperienced in the wilderness you don’t have any idea how to read its body language. Yes this includes you, even if you feel like you’ve got some sort of “special connection to animals”.
- No it doesn’t like you, it doesn’t want to be pet by you, it doesn’t want you to approach it, it doesn’t even want to be close enough to you that it’s aware of your presence.
- Yes it absolutely will attack you if it feels even a little bothered by you. No this isn’t limited just to bears and other predators, but to bison and moose and elk and basically any large animal at all.
- Yes, if it attacks you it absolutely will fuck you up.
- No, you won’t get any sympathy from anyone. It was being a wild animal and you were being a dipshit. I can tell you with plenty of experience that locals anywhere with abundant wildlife love to pass around stories of the latest asshole who got gored by a bison because they wanted a cool picture for their instagram
- The general rule for being around wildlife is that at a minimum you want to stay 25 yards away from herbivores, and 100 yards away from carnivores. That says yards, not feet. But if the animal seems to be paying any attention to you at all, you’re too close.
- No, you shouldn’t feed it. Ever. Yes, this includes you again, with your “special connection to animals”.
This probably seems a tad abrasive and unnecessary if you’re not someone who lives in the backcountry, but let me tell you I probably once a month or so have to yell at someone to back away from an animal as fast as possible because they don’t know how to read its body language and are unaware just how close their photoshoot is to getting them mauled. Just today I had to tell a lady to get away from a bison, because she didn’t know the way it was raising its tail was a warning sign. It’s extremely frustrating and disrespectful to the animals you’re stressing out because you want to post something cool to your feed. They live here, you’re lucky enough to visit, that should be enough for you. If you really love them, you’ll leave them alone.
If you’d like to hear about more harmful impacts Instagram-minded wildlife tourism has had on animals, I’d recommend this episode of National Geographic’s Overheard podcast.
As a Park Ranger this is all Good Advice, but I want to push even harder on one thing:
DO NOT FEED ANIMALS
If you feed an animal, or through direct or indirect action cause an animal to be fed, you might as well have walked up to it and choked the life out of it with your bare hands because you have killed the animal.
Animals can rapidly become habituated to people when fed, and once an animal associates people with food, it becomes very dangerous to people. Habituated animals lash out at the people who don’t feed them, they go looking for food in populated areas and end up finding pets, or dangerous locations like highways. The minute an animals stops seeing people as other animals, and starts seeing us as vending machines that need to be rocked around and hit when they break, you’ve started a chain of events which begins with hazing, and ends with someone having to put the animals down because it is just too dangerous.
Nobody in this scenario wants this to happen. Please don’t fucking feed the animals. Keep your food secured. Don’t try and approach animals.
I suspect most of my mutuals know the deal, but I’m also a big supporter of respecting wild animals and their spaces. And because of the ridiculous stuff people post in countries that have ridiculously lax pet laws, countries where people do treat wild animals in a detrimental pet-like manner, and people who’ve got no clue about animal behavior, I suspect there’s more than a few people out there that are really that ignorant of why we should we should all stick to the rules about wild animals.
