Some of you just amaze me. First off, If people don't manage their population then mother nature will. These bears are the top predator, so what is going to keep their numbers in check? The NPS has to do something to control the population and keep the numbers at a healthy level. Either tax dollars will be spent on it, or hunters will come in and pay to do it. You can't argue the fact that if the numbers get too high for the are to support then the animals suffer a much harder death.
The fact that they don't seem to fear people does not mean they are tame. It means they are potentially more dangerous. Ask the people whose towns are raided by polar bears every year.

About the Treadwell idiot, how are these camera people any different? talking about how it fed in front of their camp. Would they shoot the bear if it came after them or just keep saying "nice bear" while it opened them up?

While I don't like leaving any meat in the field, don't be fooled. It did not "rot in the open stream" as you say. Since Lone hiker wants to discuss biology, maybe he will be so kind as to honestly tell us how many animals/organisms are likely to recieve nourishment from that animal?

Sorry, the argument that the meat is left to waste doesn't work in nature, Nothing goes to waste

JUST LEAVE THE BEARS ALONE!!!!!!!!!!

Very true Beamis, rogues was a bit of an overstatement on my part. Technically speaking, we can't ascertain whether or not these opportunistic critters had "gone bad", which is more definitive of a true rogue, or were simply following the path of least resistance to satisfy a growling tummy. In either case, placing yourself knowingly in the path of hungry omnivores during times of scarce pickings still qualifies as textbook ignorance. So much so that they managed to qualify as the first human fatalities in park history. I rest my case.........

I hope Congress and the State of Alaska take quick steps to stop this terrible practice.

Any 3rd grader could tell you that he wasn't talking about the exact same bears. Goes to show how much good higher education does for you bunny huggin' posey sniffers who don't have a lick of common sense.

Alright boys, break it up. OF COURSE original writer wasn't talking about the IDENTICAL specimens that ate the fool and his guest. And as for the origin of my comments being somewhere between at less than the 3rd grade level, I guess that still qualifies as higher education by rifle-totin' redneck standards, so I'll bring it down a few notches so that all might understand.

The animals on the top of the food network judge how much food is around. In good years, momma bears make more baby bears. When the food is harder to find, momma bears don't make as many baby bears. All the little animals in the forest want to stay there, so they make enough babies to be sure that there will always be enough of them to survive when food is hard to find, and when to many are getting killed by other animals. But man is not recognized as a part of this system, so the animals don't know how to act. Sometimes, even when their numbers are low, man comes by and kills too many of them, and then they have a hard time making enough babies. This is because many kills every animal, the momma bears, the momma bears with child, the daddy bears and even the little baby bears, because somebody gave him a piece of paper that says he can do just that. But the man only takes the fur and the head, leaving the part of the animal that most others kill for laying in the dirt. This is good for other animals, because now there is "free food". So many creatures, like birds, small mammals and rodents come by and enjoy a free buffet. When they are done, special little bacteria from a family called decomposers will turn whatever the animals left into food for plants. This is good for the ground because now more plants can grow. It was also good for the birds and other animals who ate the bear, because now they can have more babies. And with all the extra bear meat laying around there will be LOTS of new babies next year for other animals. But the decomposers take years to make plant food. So that now many of next year's babies won't have the food the need, and they will starve. Let face it, how many years are there so many extra bears left to rot in the fields? This extra food is good now, but it will make for more problems in both the near and long-term. By the time the plant food is ready, there won't be enough extra plant-eating animals to eat the extra plants, so reforestation begins to happen. Oh GOD I hate writing to a 3rd grade audience! The system of checks and balances will have already over-corrected itself due to nature causes of too much glut in the system initially and returned the numbers of upper preditors to near normal levels. All of those, of course, EXCEPT the critters that function as the normal prey of the bears, whose numbers will swell such that their density per square mile will approach the maximum that the ecosystem can support, and then more hunting permits will be issued to "correct" the imbalance. So what the park service is doing is creating their own after-market sales. Along with proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is NO long-term plan in place to manage the complex issues pertaining to an ecosystem. The Alaskan Refuge was the last opportunity on this continent, and one of a precious few remaining on the planet, where you could observe the natural processes involved in a system sustained solely by complex interactions between animal and environment, without the "management" or interfering, meddling, underinformed methods of man. This was a learning tool to be taken advantage of, not a system in disarray that required correction, natural or otherwise. But in the real "world according to man", the context of the word environment is limited to only those items with monetary value, and the more they're worth, the more they're hunted and the faster they're eliminated from the environment. Buffalo, hunted solely for hide and tongue; rhinocerous, hunted solely for horns; elephant, hunted solely for tusks; various species of whales, hunted mostly for oil; various fish species which at one time were plentiful now cannot be found in numbers; various birds, hunter to near or total extinction for their feathers; there are too many others to list. To date, this is our legacy in environmental mismanagement. Please don't start writing back listing the few successes in respeciation. Yours will be a VERY short list, and the point is that they have all been returned to the bastardized environments of man, so that the very nature of the animal has been forever altered, as the eons of learned behaviors have been forced out of the nature of the beast.

Anybody for a more in-depth biology lesson? I think I'll starting to speak over the heads of the 3rd graders out there. Sorry. So as not to lose anyone, I was trying to focus on the Jethro Bodine level, 'cause even he gadiated fr'm 6th gray, according to story 'bout a man named Jed..........

And to set the record straight-

Casting dispersions on high education aside, the opening statement of my initial comment was, and I quote:
Same species doesn't qualify as same bears. I then went on to use evidence from the author's own notation to disprove his poor hypothesis. If one is to assume that a small sample size is indicative of a group as a whole, I can a strong case for our own species being worth less than a pile of bear dropping by sampling ANY daily periodical or video newscast. So branding all Brown's as killers is simply bad science. I personally don't follow the protocol required to produce bad science. It's not good for my industry. Practioners of such lame data analysis and experimental design are what made Timothy Leary appear as some sort of sage.

And for the record, I'll do the bio-speak with anyone, anytime. But beware, I prefer not to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person. My cursory explantion on the effects directly resulting from mass death within a member of any food web is just that, cursory. But the insinuation that roting meat is beneficial to the system as a whole lends toward ignorance. Superficially the arguement appears to bear some merit. However, for the reasons I laid out above and enough more to make a 2 1/2 hour lecture, it's a really, really bad idea to provide an instantaneous glut of "nourishment", with nothing but negative impacts for the long-term health of any given system. And the notion that if we didn't kill the bears Mother Nature would is again, superficially intelligent at best. The mechanism by which natural special (that spe-cial, pertaining to a species, NOT special, like your mistress or favorite dog) corrections occur in the wild is completely dependent on the factors I outlined, and again by additional factors to encompass a good week's worth of lectures. Please tell me you're not serious in the old, "if not us, then somebody" theory of ecology. The history of resultant failures directly related to mankind's interventions with the environment is enough to fill multiple volumes of encyclopedia. For those of the younger set who don't know what that is, let's say it's worth 1-2 CD/DVD's worth of information. We still, after all these years as "stewards", don't really have much of a clue as to the overall complexity of the interactions between organisms in the world around us, yet we STILL insist on meddling about with things beyond our grasp. Somewhat of an arrogant, ignorant attitude, no?

I have been going to the Katmai for 8 years. I did not see ANY males over the age of 4 this year. IS THAT MANAGEMENT? I am not debating hunting, I am questioning the your insistance that there is number management in that location and a fair hunt. I have camped on the Katmai and these bears are basically tame. Why not shoot animals in a zoo? The odds of a kill are about the same.