The internet loves an underdog story, especially when the underdog is an actual dog going up against a bear.
Last week, a French bulldog named Cassie made headlines for engaging with a bear that attacked its owner outside their home in Northern California. Earlier this year, an 11-year-old husky in Connecticut named Bella became a viral sensation for scaring away a black bear that was seemingly moments away from pouncing on an unsuspecting 6-year-old playing in a suburban driveway. And Bella followed in the brave but much smaller footsteps of Scout, a five- to six-pound Pomeranian that chased an ursine invader out of a British Columbia home last year.
Exit bear, pursued by furball.
Such stories seem to reaffirm a bond between dogs and humans that goes back at least 10,000 years. But they also belie a more complicated reality. When it comes to bear encounters in or near the wild, dogs are the aggressors in 54 percent of incidents, according to a recent study conducted by bear experts at Brigham Young University and other institutions, and published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. In approximately 36 percent of the encounters, dogs did not come to their owners’ defense. And they only successfully alerted their owners to the presence of a bear in about 9 percent of cases.
Black bears were 3.6 times more likely to be involved than brown bears, a species that includes grizzlies. Most of the dogs involved were medium-size.
To a contemporary bear, a dog is just a relative of the wolves with which it has to compete for resources in the wild.
“There’s been such a long history of antagonism between those two species,” said the study’s lead author, Tom Smith, a B.Y.U. professor and an expert on bear encounters.
Dr. Smith said he had been approached by Canadian parks officials to conduct the study after a couple and their dog, a Border collie, were killed three years ago by a grizzly bear in a remote area of Banff National Park in Alberta.
Controlled experiments involving bears, dogs and humans are, for obvious ethical reasons, impossible to conduct. That reality made some experts hesitant to embrace the study’s conclusions, even if they are generally sensible.
“I am very cautious of what you can actually conclude from such preliminary studies,” said John Hechtel, a retired wildlife biologist for Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game.
The researchers knew what they were getting into when it came to conducting this kind of work.
“We aren’t doing rocket science. It’s much more difficult than that,” quipped Lana Ciarniello, an independent scientist in Campbell River, British Columbia, who designed the province’s Bear Smart Community Program.
Dr. Ciarniello pointed out that in bear country — places like British Columbia, Alaska, Wyoming and Montana — most encounters between dogs and bears are not formally reported. The researchers combed through newspaper articles, internet reports, books and government records for descriptions of encounters, eliminating those that didn’t include sufficient detail about the outcome.
Dr. Smith, Dr. Ciarniello and their co-authors ultimately looked at 326 documented dog-bear encounters that took place between 1901 and 2023. The study included mostly black and brown bears, along with a handful of polar bears. About a third of the incidents took place in “frontcountry,” such as the easily accessible parts of national parks or the yards of rural homes. The rest took place deeper in the wilderness.
One clear lesson emerged from the numbers. In 85 percent of encounters, dogs were unleashed.
“If your dog is off leash, it’s running ahead of you. It’s going to the bush. It has a higher chance of a surprise encounter with a bear,” Dr. Ciarniello said.
Because of their evolutionary rivalry, that encounter is unlikely to be a friendly one.
Dogs also often “boomerang” back to their owners after encountering a bear. In 27 of the cases reviewed, dogs ran back to their owners after encountering a bear. In 70 percent of those cases, the human suffered injuries.
The study suggests that the presence of a dog doesn’t necessarily make a human safer in the wilderness, a conclusion that has lead to an outcry from some enthusiasts and experts.
“People aren’t wrong to have feelings about that paper,” said Nils Pedersen, the director of the Wind River Bear Institute. The organization breeds Karelian bear dogs, which are famous for their ability to scare bears away without causing deadly conflict.
“Just having grown up in Alaska with working dogs, that’s a really hard thing for me to hear and take seriously,” he said of the study’s results. “It depends on what kind of dog. It depends on the circumstances involved.”
Certain dog breeds, including the Akbash and the Pyrenean mountain dog, are known to be effective for keeping bears away because they are tough and territorial with a commanding bark. Huskies are not as effective — Bella’s heroism in Connecticut notwithstanding — in part because they have a tendency to chase and may provoke a retreating bear.
Ultimately, “the issue is really about control,” Dr. Smith said. “Most house dogs are not that well trained.” And, he said, “they don’t fight your fight for you.”
Mr. Hechtel, the retired biologist, wondered if people would really change their behavior based on the study’s findings.
“Everybody thinks their dog is better than their dog really is,” he said, “and nobody wants to keep their dog on a leash all the time.”
The study authors counter that letting dogs loose in bear country is potentially dangerous for all involved. Cassie, the French bulldog, died two days after her run-in with a bear in California. In addition, Mr. Pedersen said, unleashed dogs can be disruptive to wildlife.
“If you’re in a national park, places where bears are supposed to be, let alone moose or elk or deer, you do not want your dog chasing these critters around, harassing them,” Mr. Pedersen said. “That’s not fair.”
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