On Monday, August 24th, 2026, an deputy of the Eagle County Sheriffs Department shot and stopped a charging cinnamon color phase black bear near the River Run Apartment Complex. The bear was an adult with two cubs. From the video, it appears the deputy drew and fired the first shot in less than a second, with three followup shots following in fractions of a second after that. The Eagle County Sheriff's Office released the body camera video on September 8th, 2026
Link to video.
The video shows officers dealing with a difficult situation: An adult bear with two cubs and dozens of onlookers, was very close to where an adult bear with cubs had attacked and injured a man on August 17th, one week before. While not proven, it is highly likely this is the same bear with cubs. Watching the video, it is obvious these are human habituated, food conditioned bears. They have no fear of humans. It is highly likely some person or persons had been feeding these bears. This produced an extremely dangerous situation. Tom Smith, the famous bear researcher and self-acknowledged lover of bears, in an interview on Youtube, (about minute 37) stated about problem bears:
... the ones that are down here causing problems in the villages. You could cull them out, and quite frankly, If I was king of the West, when they are down there eating garbage, sorry, I'd just euthanize them.
This is an unusual admission for Tom Smith, who claims hunting bears does not reduce human conflict with bears. Valerius Geist, another highly trained and credentialed animal behavior biologist, who, unlike Smith, is a hunter, takes an opposite view. Tom Smith, when talking about problem bears which have become habituated to surviving on human provided food inside human towns and villages, is correct. These habituated and human food addicted bears cannot be rehabilitated. They need to be killed. "A fed bear is a dead bear", is the slogan which sums it up.
Analysis: The deputy who was forced to shoot and kill the bear did everything correctly. The video should be used as a training video to promote officer safety and to incentivize officers to practice the skills they are taught. Proficiency comes with practice. When an officer has practiced transitioning from a non-lethal weapon to their duty weapon hundreds or thousands of times, the action becomes automatic, in muscle memory, and very fast. This officer was very fast, transitioning from the non-lethal shotgun to drawing his handgun and firing, accurately and effectively, in less than a second. Such a transition is not magical. It is the result of training and practice. The officer is not one in a million. He is likely in the top three percent of officers who take their profession and the potential to use deadly force seriously and train accordingly. This may be why he was called in to deal with the situation. Most people can reach this level of proficiency if they train to do so. Sam Kezar did so, and it paid off for him. It is a high, but obtainable level of proficiency. Fortunately, extreme speed and accuracy are used in less than 10% of the documented incidents where pistols were fired in defense against bears. The bigger factor is having the mindset to use the weapon before it is needed. This officer had made the proper decisions before they were needed. He did not have to debate what was the proper thing to do.
The officer did everything he could to correctly give the bear opportunity to leave the area it should not have been in. This correspondent believes, with a high probability, this bear had already attacked one person and had not suffered any consequences. This should have been enough information to qualify the bear and cubs for lethal removal. The cubs had already become habituated to humans and addicted to human food. The bears were given extreme care because of public opinion.
It is not logic which demanded treating the bear with such extreme care, putting the officer at risk. It is the false consciousness of suicidal empathy which treats bears as somehow angelic humans, and rational defense against bears as a moral sin. We did not have these problems with bears in our towns and cities when bears were recognized as dangerous animals. They were not allowed inside our residential territory. The problem was simply and effectively solved by killing bears which persisted in invading human territory. Bears did not disappear. They survived by learning to avoid humans.
Bears are not people in furry coats. They have no sense of morals. They are opportunistic predators and cannibals. They have no rule of law. They only understand force and domination. When they are not hungry, they do not expend energy disputing over food, but when food becomes scarce, they are willing to fight and kill over it. This bear had learned that humans are weak and easily intimidated. Then she applied her learning to a human who was not weak and easily intimidated. Then she died. The people who fed this bear did not do it a favor.
©2026 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
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