They switched on the landfill fence. The grizzlies came into town.

“We brought in extra staff. We got extra equipment. And we wound up having so many bear calls that we couldn’t keep up.”

Toby Halle is a renewable resource officer who’s “as involved as you can be” in protecting the NWT town of Inuvik’s residents from bears. He’s coming off a grim summer: officers killed no fewer than 32 grizzly bears over the past few months according to NWT government statistics.

“It’s not something we wanted to do,” Halle told Cabin Radio, “but unfortunately, it needed to be done.”

The Town of Inuvik electrified its landfill fence ahead of the summer. Regulators had wanted the town to do as much for years. Prior to that, the dump was home to up to 40 grizzlies each summer – many of them deeply sickened by the “food” available there, Halle said.

Inuvik’s mayor, Peter Clarkson – who describes himself as a former grizzly bear biologist – said the fence was necessary because the sheer concentration of grizzlies at the dump each summer had become a constant threat. “You don’t have a safe community when you’ve got 40 grizzly bears on your doorstep,” he told Cabin Radio.

Energizing the fence kept the bears out, the idea being that they would gradually disperse into the wild and stop coming to the dump in future years. But in the shorter term, it created a new problem.

“When you create such an artificially high population – we probably had three or four generations of bears dependent on the landfill as a food source – and you cut that food source off, where do they go next?” Clarkson asked, rhetorically.

“There’s the town of Inuvik, sitting there with 3,500 people and all sorts of food smells.”

Grizzlies that couldn’t get into the facility would “do laps” around the fence for days, Halle said, and eventually so many bears would gather that the subordinate ones would be forced away – toward the town.

Officials knew the bears were coming. The experience of other communities had taught them it was likely that electrifying the dump fence could send the bears into harm’s way, but it was a considered a hassle worth enduring for a longer-term benefit.

Even so, it made for a hard summer. Residents, understandably, found the experience of bear sightings day after day difficult to live with.

On a Facebook group created in response to the fence being electrified – Inuvik Bear Watch – people shared intel and emotions.

“Someone is going to get attacked soon,” one resident posted to the group in late May. Another, describing bears “every single night for the past five nights” on one street, wrote: “This is getting very stressful now.”

“There was a lot of pressure for us to get out there, hunt them down and kill them all. And then there was pressure for us to not do that and to let them be bears,” said Halle.

“At the end of the day, we’re a regulatory body that leans into public safety. If there’s a question of public safety, the public wins.”

The Nihtat Gwich’in Renewable Resource Council could not be reached for comment about the summer’s bear trouble in Inuvik. The Gwich’in Renewable Resources Board had a week-long board meeting scheduled and said nobody was immediately available to comment. Steve Baryluk, an Inuvik town councillor who is also a GNWT manager of wildlife management, directed questions to the town.

Bears were ‘clearly sickly’

Clarkson and Halle each hope this summer was as bad as it gets.

Halle had read up on other communities’ experiences, since Inuvik is far from the first place to energize a fence and keep bears out of a dump – though a facility full of grizzlies is not the same as black bears, which were the problem in many other locations.

Some communities had “an uptick in bear calls and then, after a year or two, it settled down,” Halle said, recalling what he learned. “Other communities had said absolutely nothing happened – they had geared up for this big onslaught of bears and there was nothing. We were hoping for that. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that.”

In past years, the practice of the NWT’s Department of Environment and Climate Change – also known as ECC, for which Halle works – would be to either “haze” bears away from Inuvik or chase them back out of the town to the dump, he said.

“We used the dump like an anchor point. We knew the bears would eventually wind up at the dump. We would either mark the bear or recognize a feature on it so we could say, ‘Yes, this is the bear,’ and then we’d euthanize it at the landfill where it was safe and away from the public,” Halle said.

“It was an effective practice, but now we don’t have that. It’s going to change the way we respond to bears around the community.”

That’s one reason why so many bears ended up being shot by responding officers.

But Halle also feels the figure of 32 bears killed is “artificially inflated.”

“We did remove a lot of bears that were clearly sickly and dependent solely on the dump, because they didn’t know anything else. They didn’t know how to be a bear, right? If you could have seen it, you’d understand,” he said.

“These bears were eating garbage, things that aren’t food like rubber gloves and gas cans, whatever they found in the dump – lots of foil – and we saw that in their scat. We needed to defend the dump for the health of the bears and the safety of the community. We needed to make this not a thing any more.”

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ECC, in a statement, said the figure of 32 dead bears reflected the “unique local situation” of the landfill fence electrification.

“The department anticipated that the grizzly bears previously habituated to the landfill would seek alternative food sources and enter the community more frequently,” ECC stated.

“Officers used a number of deterrence measures whenever possible, but bears that posed a risk to public safety were dispatched.

“Based on the current information, we do not anticipate a significant impact on the population level for grizzly bears in the Mackenzie Delta.”

‘It’ll be less of a problem’

Clarkson thinks many residents did not realize the town was responding to an instruction from the Gwich’in Land and Water Board, a regulator, to electrify the fence.

“Opinions were all over the board,” the mayor said of residents’ response as the grizzly problem unfolded.

“I think some people thought, ‘Just let the bears feed at the dump. Is that a problem?’ Well, it is a problem. Younger bears would be chased out by older bears and when you’ve got 40 bears on your doorstep, some are going to come into town.

“ECC did a great job. They were trying to scare the bears out of town, get them back into a natural environment, get them to spread out over the countryside. But in the end, that just wasn’t enough of a deterrent for some of the bears, and then those bears were destroyed.”

Clarkson is confident that this summer’s pain will be worthwhile in the long run.

“We’re going to go through this for hopefully one year,” he said.

“The bear population will spread out again, get back into more of a natural environment. We’ll keep maintaining the fence to keep bears out, and then it’ll be less of a problem.”

“I think we got a lot of the bears that rely solely on the dump,” said Halle.

“I’m hoping that next year, our call volume will be down and we won’t see as many bears around the community.

“That being said, there are still bears around. Just because we shot 30 bears this year, doesn’t mean they’re all gone.”