After making a difficult wildlife management decision, Montana wildlife officers were forced to remove 15 black bears from a single residence just north of Bozeman last week. Out of the 15 bears, 14 of them were killed by wildlife officials while one cub was taken alive to the state’s Montana WILD facility in Helena with hopes of being placed at an accredited zoo.
Reports indicate that game wardens and wildlife staff with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks were on the property September 24th and 25th after a concerned citizen reported that someone was feeding wild black bears there. What they found, FWP says, was a concentration of bears that were extremely food-conditioned and had completely lost their fear of people.
“These bears were unafraid of humans and stopped relying on natural foods, which created a human safety risk,” game warden Captain Josh Leonard said in the agency’s account of the response. “It’s very unfortunate they had to be euthanized. An investigation into why the bears were on this property is ongoing.”
FWP spokesman Morgan Jacobsen has been blunt about the scale, stating that the agency typically removes 8 to 10 problem bears a year from the entire Bozeman area. Fourteen at one house is unheard of and he went on to tell reporters he does not know of another case in which FWP has had to kill that many bears at a single property. So far the agency has not named anyone, has not given the exact location, has said they cannot confirm whether investigators are looking at one person or more, and that they believe intentional feeding at the residence was happening.
Charges could soon follow.
Unfortunately for these hungry bruins, relocation was not treated as an option. Food-conditioned black bears commonly travel long distances back to a known handout, or they simply take the same habit to the next neighborhood. Jacobsen has described euthanasia as a last resort used when the safety risk cannot be fixed another way.
“Nobody gets into this career wanting to do that,” he told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “But the reality is human safety is the top priority.”
Montana law prohibits providing supplemental feed attractants to game animals, including bears, under certain circumstances. A conviction can bring a fine of $50 to $1,000, up to six months in county jail, or both, and a court can also strip hunting, fishing, and trapping privileges.
The Bozeman house is the extreme case, but not the only one. Across the Mountain West, a dry year and a failed natural food crop have pushed black bears into towns just as they hit hyperphagia. Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks warned in late July that the berry crop was failing and called 2026 one of the worst natural food years on record. Utah’s bear responses have roughly doubled, Wyoming has described conflicts as unprecedented, and Colorado, Parks and Wildlife logged more than 6,100 bear reports by mid-August, and had killed close to 300 black bears over conflicts — about four times a normal year.
