Newmarket Bear RIP

I have been asked to give my opinion on the Newmarket bear tragedy.

I've been reluctant to do so because I wasn't there and I don't know what the police saw that gave them justification to issue the kill order.  Even if you watched the event unfold on television, you could never truly have the same perspective as the police officers on the scene.

There are some assumptions I feel relatively comfortable making.

1) The bear was lost, tired, hungry and thirsty.  The bear was under a tremendous amount of stress after being harried by the police and sought refuge in a tree.  Any animal under such extreme conditions can become unpredictable and dangerous.

2)  The police must have perceived an extreme degree of danger that would have been considered imminent.  Who was in danger?  We don't know.  But the amount of danger that this person was in would have outweighed the risk of firing multiple live rounds within a heavily populated residential neighbourhood.

As any police officer knows, once you squeeze the trigger, you have no way of being certain that the fired bullet will find it's target.  Any bullet leaving a gun barrel can have lethal consequences for an unintended person and the exterior walls of most homes would not stop these bullets.  The police are trained to only fire when so close to homes if there is immediate danger.  In this case, someone must have been moments away from being mauled by this bear.

And if that is the case, then it was the right decision to shoot to kill.

If an officer or a member of the public got too close to the bear and that started the chain of events that led to the bear's death, then that situation needs to be addressed.  It seems clear that something went wrong with establishing a safe barrier between the animal and the police/ public resulting in deadly consequences.

I won't put the blame on Ministry of Natural Resources.  An imminent bear attack wouldn't have ended with any different result even if the MNR officer was present on the scene.  Tranquilizers wouldn't have prevented a mauling and protecting human life is always our first priority.