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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Bonus Video 1: Wednesday, March 26, 2025 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Harrison Ford's famous broccoli joke.....

Bonus Video 1: Wednesday, March 26, 2025

 Harrison Ford's famous broccoli joke.....

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Wyoming Life

CHEYENNE — In 2022, Jessica Boyd put in an offer for an older home right on the edge of what she could afford on her hospital job’s salary. 

The mother of four had second thoughts over the home’s ancient heating unit. It looked Jurassic — like something that could go extinct at any moment, leaving her holding an expensive bag.

With four children to feed and care for, how could she possibly afford to replace the furnace if it finally croaked?

“I told them, I don’t want to move in with that in there,” she said. “I wanted them to go ahead and just replace it. They wouldn’t, so I decided not to purchase it.”

Homes in Boyd’s range — around $200,000 at current interest rates — haven’t gotten any better since then. 

“The homes in that range are trailers in trailer parks,” she said. “They’re not even on a foundation or anything.”

Or they are “massive” fixer uppers, like the $180,000 home she went to see that turned out to be a burned-out shell.

“I went to see it and when I looked inside, the whole inside was burned down,” she said. “I was like, ‘You’re selling this for that much money? You can’t even live in this'. It’s just crazy. Just insane.”

. Wyoming needs 20,000 to 38,000 more homes by 2030 to keep up with demand, according to a statewide housing study commissioned by Wyoming Community Development Authority. 

That gap is continuing to widen, as housing costs continue to rise faster than median incomes. 

Boyd was never supposed to be shopping for a home as a single parent. She and her children’s father had been looking at houses together, but he died a couple years ago.

Her hospital job as a team leader in the payments division pays well, she said, but she still can’t afford anything on the market in Cheyenne.

“Prices just keep getting higher and higher,” she said. “Really, without two incomes, without two people having a decent job, you’ll just be renting the rest of your life.”

Buyers like Boyd — working families shut out of conventional starter homes even with decent, full-time paychecks — are exactly who Habitat for Humanity is working to reach with its new Pronghorn Crossing neighborhood in Cheyenne, a 12-home development reserved for buyers who make 80% or less of median incomes. 

The development on the city’s eastern edge is the largest, most ambitious project to date for Habitat for Humanity of Laramie County. 

It will ultimately have six attached twin homes, for a total of 12 in all, ranging from three to four bedrooms, with two baths. 

The homes are being built with structurally insulated panels, high-efficiency mini-split heating and cooling, tankless water heaters and solar panels, all aimed at keeping utility bills low once families move in.

There are no garages and the yards are tiny, but for working-class families trying to find that first stepping stone to financial stability, it’s a lifesaver, Boyd said. 

“I lived in a townhome before and I always said, like, ‘I will never live back in a townhome style house',” Boyd said. “And when these came up, I was like, you know what, I’m not going to argue. I’m not going to be picking about it. This is a blessing, and I’m so grateful, so happy for this.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Not A Free Home"}]

Boyd isn’t the only Pronghorn Crossing buyer who has been shut out of Cheyenne’s starter home market. Victoria Hunt is also in line for one of the twin homes. 

The mother of three is a recovering addict, working hard for a second chance at life. 

“I met someone and just kind of got into like opiates and pills and things, and it just became worse and worse,” she said. “I went through a pretty rough divorce and I was separated, living with my family.”

During that time, she learned about drugs and street life. 

“That totally changed everything for me,” she said. “And then it went downhill really, really fast.”

After an arrest, she was offered the chance to try a treatment program in Rock Springs. 

“I spent five months there, and then literally came out with just the clothes on my back,” she said. 

She’s employed full-time now, but starting from scratch with three children is not an easy road. 

The day she learned she had been selected to become one of the 12 Habitat for Humanity home owners was one of the best of her life.

“I’ve already saved and have my down payment,” she said. “And now I just have to put in the hours.”

Habitat homes are not free. Buyers like Hunt and Boyd must get mortgages and pay closing costs. They also put in hundreds of hours of “sweat equity” working on their and their neighbors’ homes, which further helps lower the costs of building the homes.

Creating this development for second chances and first-time homebuyers wasn’t an easy task. It was a jigsaw puzzle from the start, one missing a few key pieces.

Habitat for Humanity’s Daffney Sandoval told Cowboy State Daily the .93-acre lot for the project was donated to Habitat for Humanity of Laramie County six years ago by Leaning Tree Homes. 

But a bare piece of land is just one piece of the puzzle. There were no streets, no sidewalks, no sewer or water lines — none of the basic infrastructure a nice neighborhood requires before even one house can go up.

“We kind of sat on it for a while because the cost of the infrastructure was going to cost over $1.8 million,” Sandoval said. “And that’s just the road, gutters, sewer, sidewalk, water stuff, the retaining walls and this detention pond.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The math was tough for Habitat."}]

Its participants do obtain loans that help cover, on a sliding-fee scale basis, at least some of their home’s true costs. 

Each participant’s home cost is set based on their annual incomes, but if the actual cost lies too far outside what their incomes can cover, then the projects become too difficult for the nonprofit to pull off.  

So, in 2023, Habitat for Humanity decided to help advocate for a statewide Unmet Housing Needs fund in Wyoming. 

“They passed it with $10 million — $5 million from ARPA and $5 million in state funds,” Sandoval said. “And the city actually applied on our behalf to the Unmet Housing Needs fund to get the infrastructure completed here.”

That allowed the project to break ground in November 2024 to get the basic infrastructure in place.

With that in place, the homes work out to around $315,000 each, which is workable. 

Without it, the homes are closer to $375,000 — a price point that would push the homes out of reach for the very families the project is meant to serve. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"How To Turn Eight Into 12"}]

Policy changes at the local level also helped stretch the project further. 

Originally, there was only room for eight single-family dwellings on the property due to Cheyenne’s zoning and lot-size rules.

But the city has since rethought many of its ordinances around home-building, hoping to spur new construction. 

It has scrapped minimum lot sizes for residential properties, removed density caps for multi-family units, changed setbacks, and removed minimum parking requirements. 

They’ve removed luxury material requirements from multi-family building facades and display-window requirements for multi-family dwelling units.

They’ve also added cottage lots, for multiple, small, clustered houses designed to face a shared common open space. Sharing infrastructure that way helped further lower construction costs for the Habitat project, Sandoval added.

“We’ll have plenty of parking,” she said. “And we’ll do a privacy fence in the back, and we used the cottage law amendment with the city, so we have kind of shared yard spaces.”

The cottage lot option also allowed Habitat to build six twin homes for 12 units in all, instead of just eight.

Each of the homes will carry a small, forgivable second mortgage and a shared-equity clause — along with Habitat’s right of first refusal if owners ever decide to sell. That prevents quick flips, and helps ensure the units remain affordable for future working families, Sandoval said.

As big a lifesaver as the Unmet Housing Needs fund was for the Pronghorn Crossing project, the $10 million fund is barely scratching the itch that is Wyoming’s housing problem.

When the state opened applications for grants from the Unmet Housing Needs fund, communities responded with 21 separate proposals totaling roughly $51 million in requested help — more than five times what the fund could provide. 

The projects included many aimed at workforce housing, as well as senior housing, and other developments similar to Pronghorn Crossing in towns all over Wyoming. 

That has Habitat pushing for other big-picture changes at the state level — fixes that don’t necessarily require a big new pot of money but that would change how existing tools can be used.

One example Executive Director Dan Dorsch cited is the TIF district, a special taxing district that works by borrowing from future tax revenue generated by property improvements. 

Typically used for blighted or vacant properties, the structure is intended to answer the chicken-and-egg proposition for a tract of land that’s not going anywhere because the costs of cleaning it up or building infrastructure mean developments don’t pencil out.

Dorsch said he believes the same dynamic could be used for affordable-housing projects, instead of just blighted or vacant lots, to help get them off the ground.

“Affordable housing improves property taxes as well,” he said. “So the same principle would work.”

Pronghorn, for example, will generate new property tax increases totaling up to $48,000 annually.

“Nobody can build affordable housing,” he said. “So why not have that incentive there to build it?”

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<title>Cheyenne’s Habitat Fix Turns Eight Homes Into Affordable Housing For 12 Families | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Two single moms shut out of Cheyenne’s starter-home market are among 12 families getting a chance at homeownership in a new Habitat for Humanity  neighborhood. Once set for eight houses, it grew to 12 after Cheyenne rewrote building and zoning rules.

Cheyenne’s Habitat Fix Turns Eight Homes Into Affordable Housing For 12 Families

CHEYENNE — There’s always been something a little bit sentimental about the south end of the Cheyenne Frontier Days arena. 

The historic Chute 9 at Frontier Park has long been known as the best seat in the arena because it held court over some of the most intense timed-event rodeo action in the world. 

To the casual onlooker watching it get torn down last August, it might have appeared to be little more than a weathered wooden box, but it has always been sacred ground to the cowboys and volunteers working there. 

Now the humble wooden box has been reborn as a shiny, steel-spanned, multi-level VIP-ready cathedral to rodeo. The people who know it best say the new Chute 9 still has the same heart, and there’s a lot more polish now.

“It’s always been the best seat in the house,” longtime volunteer Kimberly Chernogorec told Cowboy State Daily. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"And, in her opinion, it still is."}]

Chernogorec has spent her entire 30-year CFD Committee career at Chute 9, starting as its first female “toe” — one of the kids under the chutes who help sort and push the cattle through — back in 1997. 

“It was a little bittersweet,” she admitted. “You always want a bigger, better thing. And then the bigger, better thing happens, and you’re like, ‘Well, now I miss the old one.’”

The old Chute 9 was, in frank terms, past its prime.

“It was not structurally sound,” Cheyenne Frontier Days CEO Tom Hirsig told Cowboy State Daily. “The Chute 9 that we had, the kind of square box up over the rope and chutes, had far outlived its life expectancy. So we had to do something.”

Fixing it was going to be a huge challenge, but a comprehensive look at long-range needs suggested a huge opportunity. 

“One of the things that we recognize is the need for VIP experiences,” Hirsig said. “Those are the fastest things that go, if there’s some sort of a VIP area.”

Cheyenne Frontier Days has a substantial amount of deferred maintenance to handle, and much of it doesn’t directly generate revenue. An expanded VIP seating area, however, will generate revenue and can help pay for the improvements Frontier Park needs.

When Chute 9 is unveiled this year, the $8 million project will offer a full-blown experience that seats around 450 people in a mix of VIP boxes and individual seats. The previous structure had a rooftop terrace area for a VIP experience that could only hold about 70.

The first two levels of the new Chute 9 are boxes, most holding 22 to 30 people, with food and beer service. Above that, a third level of individual seating gives solo rodeo fans and small groups a chance to buy into the same elevated view, without needing to fill an entire box. 

“Once you go up there, it’s going to be hard to go back to sitting in the stands,” Hirsig said. “It’s going to be one of the most incredible outdoor rodeo experiences anywhere in the country. I haven’t seen anything like this before. It’s going to be top-shelf stuff to come watch the rodeo.”

Under The Chute: Celebrities, Mud, Stories

To volunteers like Chernogorec, Chute 9 isn’t just a new build. It’s a name that has weight. It’s a legend.

She still remembers the time — and her dad still tells the story — when Tim McGraw and Faith Hill were climbing the back stairs to the old VIP deck. Faith was dressed head-to-toe in white. 

“At the same time she was walking up the stairs, my dad was standing there and I pushed a steer forward,” Chernogorec recalled. “And it splashed her with mud and muck. Dad thought it was extraordinarily funny.”

Hill, not so much. But “such is wearing white to a rodeo,” Chernogorec said with a chuckle.

Chernogorec also remembers when Reba McEntire showed up at Chute 9 to watch her brother, a steer roper. 

“She was just sitting down on the bleachers underneath the chute to watch her brother rope,” Chernogorec said. “And all of us kids kind of got wind she was around and we found that she went into the porta potty.”

When McEntire opened the door, she was greeted by a lineup of 10 “toes” hoping to get her autograph.

Chernogorec met many celebrities while working under Chute 9, she added.

“If a performer was like a rodeo type person, they generally would come under Chute 9 and we would get to meet them and just hang out,” she said.

But to Chernogorec, the real celebrities weren’t the stars who showed up at Chute 9. It was the older cowboys who would drift in to watch and sometimes talk about life.

“If you can get them to talk, they’ll tell you everything that they ever did or everything that they ever knew,” she said. “It’s really, really cool. It’s just amazing to hear the history, and it’s a lot of fun to be able to continue the history and the legacy from their end.”

Chute 9 has become an enduring legend. At first, its name was just because the arena had eight bucking chutes, so the cowboys and crew took to calling the unnumbered timed event chute, tucked at the south end, Chute 9. 

Eventually Cheyenne Frontier Days expanded to 10 bucking chutes, but no one wanted to lose the name Chute 9 for the timed events. There was just something about it. 

So, leadership made a deliberate decision not to call any of the bucking chutes No. 9. Instead, they gave the two new bucking chutes the numerals zero and double zero, leaving the legendary Chute 9 an enduring place in CFD history.

It was about protecting tradition, Hirsig said.

“It’s always been referred to as Chute 9 ever since I can remember,” he said. “It’s got a huge tradition.”

For all the glitz and glamour of the new build — stadium seating, bar service, television mounts so you never miss a second of the action — the basic layout for Chute 9 remains the same, Chernogorec said. That honors tradition and felt good to her during Thursday’s steer roping. 

“Instead of wooden chutes, we have steel chutes,” she said. “It feels new and it’s not wooden slide gates anymore, but actual spring-loaded gates and stuff. But it still functions the way it always functioned. It’s just new.”

Underneath the chute, there will still be an army of 20 or so kids and 20 or so adults, sorting the cattle and opening and closing the gates, ensuring the whole timed-event machine runs as smoothly as it ever did.

To Chernogorec, under Chute 9 is the best seat in the house. 

“You can see everything,” she said. “And there’s something about standing at the south end of the arena — when our arena is the largest outdoor arena in the world — and you stand at the south side and look to the north end and just see the expanse and how truly large our arena is.”

Everyone, she added, should absolutely get a seat in the new Chute 9 VIP areas if they have the chance at least once. 

The bet Hirsig is making is that once won’t be enough. That’s the hope for building the future of the event for generations to come.

“After people see this and experience it, I think it’s going to be tough to get a ticket,” he said.

Chute 9 20260710 102704 7 11 26

<title>From Basic Box To VIP Showpiece: New Chute 9 To Debut At Cheyenne Frontier Days | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Diehard rodeo fans say there's no better place to watch Cheyenne Frontier Days than Chute 9. Now it's even better as it's been rebuilt as a three-level VIP cathedral. “It’s the most incredible outdoor rodeo experience in the country," CFD's Tom Hirsig says.

From Basic Box To VIP Showpiece: New Chute 9 To Debut At Cheyenne Frontier Days

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Around Wyoming

A Gillette mom believes this summer and early fall likely represents the last chance she’ll have to make memories with her daughter who is battling a life-ending condition.

Plans for road trips that would allow Londen Tabor and her daughter Autumn, 20, to drive the Badlands, camp in the Black Hills, go rock hounding across the state, and travel to North Carolina to see family in their 2000 Chevy Suburban are on hold because the SUV's transmission just died.

“I was driving along and thought, ‘Are you kidding me,'” Tabor said when the vehicle broke down. “The Suburban is completely out now, and it just feels like the world is against me.”

If the transmission hadn't failed, a short camping trip using the Suburban in May to an agate festival in Montana revealed that the heat, space, and mosquitos — coupled with her daughter being in the last stage of juvenile Huntington’s disease — meant taking the Suburban across the country was not going to work.

Tabor, 43, hasn’t given up on making that last road trip happen and is 

Autumn was diagnosed with the disease in 2018 at age 12, which also is the same year that her father, Justin Fender, died from the same condition at age 36. 

Tabor and Fender never married and had broken up in 2008, but Tabor said he moved to the Gillette area to be near their children, Autumn and her brother Logan. Her oldest son, Dakota, also considered him as his dad.

Tabor married her husband Chris in 2014, and he adopted Autumn.

Seeing the disease that took Fender now gripping her only daughter “breaks my heart,” Tabor said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Disease’s Impact"}]

The website for the Huntington’s Disease Society of America says the disease affects brain cells, resulting in changes in personality, coordination, behavior, speech, or the ability to learn, according to the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Tabor has witnessed all of that in Autumn."}]

Tabor said her daughter went from being a cheerleader in her freshman and sophomore years of high school to a measured decline that has brought her to a place today where she is totally dependent on Tabor for care.

Young people with the disease typically decline five times faster than adults, she said.

“It’s crazy, because you go from 2018 and then 2019 and 2020, and there are these little changes,” she said. "Up until about 2021, she could still ride a bike.

"Then we got her a three-wheel bike, but it was only a year that she was able to ride it.”

 with Autumn that was meant to share their journey with the disease and educate others. Over the years, they’ve gathered 160,000 followers.

The mother and daughter in 2023 turned a journey that included a Huntington’s Disease Association event into a 6,280-mile trip from Wyoming to Arkansas, Tennessee, the Carolinas and a stop at the White House. 

They made the trip in Tabor’s small Kia Soul, stayed in hotels, and made a couple of media appearances.

But to use the Kia now would be much more difficult. 

Tabor needs to transfer Autumn in and out of the vehicle and put her wheelchair in it.

Tabor said sometimes it’s hard to look back on her TikTok posts because they show the rapid progression of Autumn’s disease. 

But the social media platform has also forged new relationships they never would have had before.

During their 2023 trip, Autumn and her mom visited and stayed with an Arkansas woman who they had connected with over the social media platform. They hope to visit her again this year.

<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@londenandautumn/video/7580103755614489886" data-video-id="7580103755614489886" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@londenandautumn" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@londenandautumn?refer=embed">@londenandautumn</a> Trying to find the light through all the darkness. :broken_heart:  <a title="juvenilehuntingtonsdisease" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/juvenilehuntingtonsdisease?refer=embed">#JuvenileHuntingtonsDisease</a> <a title="huntingtonsdisease" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/huntingtonsdisease?refer=embed">#HuntingtonsDisease</a> <a title="jhdawareness" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/jhdawareness?refer=embed">#jhdawareness</a> <a title="jhdwarrior" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/jhdwarrior?refer=embed">#jhdwarrior</a> <a title="huntingtonsdiseaseawareness:blue_heart::purple_heart:" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/huntingtonsdiseaseawareness%F0%9F%92%99%F0%9F%92%9C?refer=embed">#huntingtonsdiseaseawareness:blue_heart::purple_heart:</a> <a target="_blank" title="♬ Light of the Soul - SANTANA J.L.M" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/Light-of-the-Soul-7398942910102865937?refer=embed">♬ Light of the Soul - SANTANA J.L.M</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Agenda"}]

Tabor’s initial plans were to go on a rockhounding trip across Wyoming on their way to Salt Lake City for the National Youth Alliance’s juvenile Huntington’s disease retreat later this month. 

She’s bought tickets for a Benson Boone concert in Casper in early September. Her daughter is a big fan.

Later in September, the plan called for a monthlong road trip to the East Coast to visit her sons and Autumn’s brothers in North Carolina, Tabor’s family in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a stop at the Omaha zoo in Nebraska, and the drive to Arkansas.

“This is like the last chance I have to do this with my daughter,” Tabor said. “I just want a couple of months with my daughter (where) I don’t have to worry and I have a climate-controlled vehicle that I could pull over and feed her.”

In the meantime, Autumn’s decline continues. Now, she's finding it harder to swallow.

to rent a camping van from late this month through October for the trips was difficult.

She did not want to have to ask for help from others, but it seemed like the only viable solution.

“I know what this disease does. I know how fast it progresses,” she said. “I know where we are at, and it’s not looking good.”

The trips are not about a “luxury vacation” on wheels, but an attempt to provide a safe environment and allow her daughter to “get out there and live life to the fullest while she still can,” Tabor wrote in her GoFundMe post.

She appreciates those who have already responded, which as of Saturday is at $3,327 of a $9,000 goal.

Tabor, who for a couple of years experienced her own health issues and had to leave a position taking care of finances at a dental clinic, stays home and looks after Autumn. 

Her daughter goes to a “day-hab” a few days a week with others who have disabilities, she said.

The hardest thing for Tabor remains thinking back to Autumn’s “normal years” before the diagnosis and having to watch her transformation under the disease.

“I don’t know what’s worse, just having something you have to face your whole life or to have this beautiful, amazing child, and then all of a sudden have her just start to be ripped away from you,” Tabor said. “To be ripped away slowly and slowly until there is nothing left and to know what she could have had.”

Contact Dale Killingbeck at dale@cowboystatedaily.com

Last trip Mother Daughter 7 11 26

<title>Last Road Trip For Gillette Mom And Dying Daughter Derailed By Broken-Down SUV | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A Gillette woman's plans for one last summer road trip with her dying daughter have been derailed by a failed transmission in their 26-year-old SUV. But she's not giving up hope. “This is the last chance I have to do this with my daughter,” Londen Tabor said.

Last Road Trip For Gillette Mom And Dying Daughter Derailed By Broken-Down SUV

Heinz mark

Mark Heinz

Wildlife

Human remains that were apparently scavenged by a bear, or bears, were discovered Sunday near Grand Mesa in western Colorado, officials there reported.

However, investigators haven’t found evidence that the unidentified person was killed in a bear attack before the bear(s) and “other wildlife” began eating the remains, 

Mesa County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a report of human remains at the Wild Rose Picnic Area of Land End Road, according to reports.

The Mesa County Coroner’s Office is trying to determine the cause of death and expected to release the person’s identity, although it’s not known when that will be, News 11 reported.

As of Friday, Colorado Parks and Wildlife wasn’t planning any further action, agency spokesman Luke Perkins told Cowboy State Daily.

The incident isn’t being treated as a possible bear-attack fatality, he said.

When asked if there was concern over whether eating from the body could cause a bear or bears to become acclimated to human flesh, Perkins said CPW doesn’t think there’s any “threat to human safety.”

Retired federal ecologist Chuck Neal of Cody said given the lack of information available it’s difficult to determine what that might mean in terms of bear behavior after eating the body.

"However, if it is true that a bear didn’t kill the person before eating from the body, the risk of that bear trying to eat more people is extremely low,” he said.

Bears are “opportunistic omnivores,” and happening upon a dead human body would be just another easy meal from the bear’s perspective, Neal said.

“If it was a one-off thing that doesn’t make that particular bear any more dangerous to human beings,” he said. “I would not think that just one taste would make that bear extremely dangerous.”

Moreover, if the body was in a state of decay, it would smell and taste much different than a live human, he added.

“It would just be another lump of rotten flesh,” Neal said.

There are other examples of wild carnivores eating bodies but not wanting to go after live humans, he said.

For example, when pioneers were pushing westward many died along the trail and were buried in shallow graves. That provided a morbid buffet for wolves.

“It became routine for wolves to dig up and eat human bodies, but they didn’t then start trying to prey on live humans,” he said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"‘Most Predacious’"}]

Grizzlies might evoke the most fear among humans, with reports of terrifying attacks. But male black bears can actually be the most dangerous in the Lower 48, Neal said.

Nearly all grizzly attacks are territorial, defensive or because a person surprised a bear at close range. Bears deliberately hunting humans is extremely rare, but male black bears are the most likely to do it, Neal said.

“A male black bear is the most predacious bear toward humans in the Lower 48. Polar bears are the most predacious of any species, but we don’t have to deal with them here,” he said.

A male black bear has to be “the biggest, strongest male out there” to win mating opportunities with females, Neal explained. And so, a big male black bear wanting to pack on the pounds might, in rare instances, see people as possible prey.

“They might see a human as a high-quality lump of protein. Sort of like a hot dog,” he said.

Male grizzlies, likewise, want to eat big to get big, Neal said. However, given their superior size and strength, they can take down large animals and don’t need to bother with humans.

Black bear getty 5 10 26

<title>Investigators Say Colorado Bear That Ate Human Remains Shouldn’t Crave People | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Investigators don’t think a bear or bears that ate parts of a human body found Sunday near Grand Mesa in western Colorado will develop a taste for people. They likely didn’t hunt the person, but instead scavenged someone already dead.

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