A grizzly bear was captured and killed in Yellowstone National Park this week after becoming too used to human food. It’s the first grizzly to be killed within the boundaries of Yellowstone since 2017.
The National Park Service (NPS) announced that the 11-year-old male grizzly had repeatedly sought out human food, turning over several bear-proof dumpsters and bear-resistant trash cans in several different areas of the park between April 3 and May 13.
Because the incidents were happening near some of the busiest spots in Yellowstone, the decision was made to euthanize the bear rather than relocate it.
It was put down Wednesday.
“It’s unfortunate that this bear began regularly seeking out garbage and was able to defeat the park’s bear-resistant infrastructure,” Yellowstone Bear Management Biologist Kerry Gunther said in a statement Thursday.
Smarter Than The Average Bear
According to the NPS, Yellowstone’s bear-resistant dumpsters can weigh more than 800 pounds. The heaviest grizzly recorded in Yellowstone, captured in 1977, weighed 715 pounds.
Nevertheless, the 11-year-old grizzly found a way to overturn dumpsters near Old Faithful, the Nez Perce Picnic Area and the Midway Geyser Basin parking lot. Furthermore, the grizzly knocked over several bear-resistant trash cans, which have concrete bases specifically to deter or prevent this kind of behavior.
That level of intelligence and determination in a grizzly is rarely seen in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The NPS was concerned about the heightened risk of a human-grizzly incident, especially at Old Faithful, which is by far the busiest spot in Yellowstone.
“We go to great lengths to protect bears and prevent them from becoming conditioned to human food,” Gunther said. “But occasionally, a bear outsmarts us or overcomes our defenses. When that happens, we sometimes have to remove the bear from the population to protect visitors and property.”
Because the grizzly was frequently causing chaos in the vicinity of Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park staff were mobilized to capture and euthanize it.
First This Year
This is the first grizzly killed in a management action in Yellowstone since 2017, when a grizzly was killed for tearing into tents near Heart Lake in the search for human food.
It’s also the first lethal grizzly management action in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 2025. Other grizzlies have been killed since emerging from hibernation, but those were the result of accidental encounters rather than bureaucratic management decisions.
Grizzly 1058, one of Grizzly’s 399 famous quadruplets, was killed by a vehicle strike in Grand Teton National Park in early May. Another grizzly was shot dead after charging a shed antler hunter near Dupuyer, Montana,in mid-April.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regularly captures grizzlies that have shown signs of becoming habituated to human food. The decision to relocate or remove a grizzly from the population is determined by several factors, including the frequency of incidents.
Management actions like these are rare within the boundaries of a national park, but not entirely unheard of. In July 2023, a five-year-old female grizzly was killed in Glacier National Park after showing “increasingly aggressive behavior” after becoming food-conditioned.
“This action was taken after the bear received multiple food rewards from unsecured sources, causing it to exhibit increasingly aggressive behavior,” the park said in a release. “This behavior posed a threat to human safety, making it necessary to remove it from the population.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
