In what is becoming something of a trend in wild rose country, another pair of grizzly bears have turned up dead in Alberta. Without much of a doubt that foul play was at work in both cases, provincial officials are hot on the case and have turned to the public for help amid a climate of rising tensions over bear management in western Canada.
On the heels of two other bears being killed along a highway near Sundre back in June, no other grizzly jurisdiction in North America has put up a public cluster of illegal grizzly kills like Alberta has in such a short period of time.
The initial call came in late last month when officers were called to a lease road about 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) north of Swan Hills on September 30th. There officers found a grizzly that had been shot and left on the shoulder of the road that ran along the Swan River. Thankfully, someone was close by and eyewitness accounts put the killing between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. that day. Nothing released so far indicates parts were taken.
The Sept 30th bear | Alberta Fish and Wildlife Enforcement
The very next day, officers were made aware of a second dead grizzly that was found on Deep Valley Road, between Little Smoky and Fox Creek. That bear had been shot, dragged off the main trail, and had all four paws surgically removed. Without much to go on in the second killing, investigators are in search of information regarding any suspicious activity in the area from Sept. 25 through Oct. 3. The two kill sites sit roughly 100 kilometres (~62 miles) apart and as far as anyone can tell, no public evidence currently links them together.
The second, pawless grizz | Alberta Fish and Wildlife Enforcement
The bears those shooters killed are part of a population that, based on the province’s own numbers, are mounting a comeback. Despite once occupying much of Alberta’s grasslands, parkland and mountains, settlement and market hunting decimated bears that once called the prairies home, leaving what was left of them to be found in the Rockies, the foothills, the Swan Hills and northwest regions of the province.
DNA work in the mid-2000s put the remnant total at about 700 bears and closed sport hunting in the province back in 2006. Four years after that, the species was listed as threatened, and recovery plans produced in 2008 and 2020 set the targets that still govern the file today. Currently, the province pegs the population at about 1,100 animals, up from roughly 700 in 2010, and says human-caused mortality has stayed under 3.5 percent of that estimate every year since the listing.
However, those newer totals are not a fresh census. The last full DNA inventories ran from 2004 to 2018, with some provincial units having not been resurveyed since as far back as 2008. Where bears have been remeasured in the province, the trend remains on an upward trajectory or in the very least, looks stable. The overall direction in Alberta is very much trending toward recovery and now the argument that is gaining steam is over how to manage a bear that is no longer at the bottom.
In June 2024 the province created the Wildlife Management Responder Network, which lets pre-approved hunters kill a specific “problem” bear when an officer authorizes it. In these instances, the responder must turn the carcass in and may keep every part of the bear except the gallbladder. Only one bear was killed through the program in 2025, but this year’s count sits at 14 through the network and another six that were killed by officers. The province says those removals were outside recovery zones, mostly over livestock, and that none of them impeded recovery efforts.
Critics, including the Alberta Wilderness Association and bear biologists, call it a hunt without the name, which later led rural municipalities to try and rally the province to go ahead and put a label on it. In late March, the Rural Municipalities of Alberta put forth a motion to “advocate to the [provincial government] to implement a regulated grizzly bear hunt administered through a draw system."
Later in June, Minister of Forestry and Parks Todd Loewen lightly clapped back on the idea, stating that there were “no plans right now” for a season, but that the province was still giving the RMA motion full consideration.
Now as that motion remains idle, so too do the growing number of discarded bear carcasses in Alberta. As the province continues to argue about just who gets to pull the trigger legally, it seems like there is a growing number of people who are simply refusing to wait for the answer.
