Black bears get lazier, fatter -- and fast food is to blame

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
THE NEW YORK TIMES

It's no secret that America's adults are getting fat and sedentary. Its
children are becoming couch mini-potatoes. Even its pets are overweight.

Now the fast-food lifestyle is getting to the bears, too.

A study of black bears in the Sierra Nevada has found that those animals
that live in and around cities and towns are less active than those in
wilderness, spending less of their time foraging for food and fewer days in
their winter dens. These and other behavioral changes are making the bears
heavier.

The culprit, say the study's authors, Dr. Jon Beckmann and Dr. Joel Berger
of the Wildlife Conservation Society, is the garbage found at fast-food
restaurants and in residential neighborhoods. As many Westerners are all
too aware, black bears are forsaking their wild stomping grounds to patrol
back yards and parking lots for nutritious trash.

"For a bear, garbage is probably the ultimate food resource," said
Beckmann, who works in the conservation group's field office in Rigby,
Idaho.

"It's available year-round, it's in the same place week after week, and
it's replenished after use."

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fast-growing Lake Tahoe basin on
the California-Nevada border, which Beckmann and Berger chose for the
study.

The researchers, who also are affiliated with the University of Nevada at
Reno, attached radio collars to 59 bears and tracked them from week to
week. They found that the animals fell into two camps: country bears, which
spent almost all of their time in wild lands, and city bears, which lived
in residential areas, often right under people's noses.

A black bear fattening up for the winter is a glutton, eating upward of
20,000 calories a day. In the study, country bears, forced to roam over
wild lands searching for pine cones, troves of berry bushes or the
occasional prey, spent more than 13 hours a day foraging. City bears, with
all that rich garbage for the taking, spent much less time, an average of
about 8.5 hours a day.

Because the garbage supply, unlike the natural food supply, does not
diminish in winter, the researchers found that city bears spent an average
of 42 fewer days in their winter dens. Some urban bears did not have winter
dens at all.

"With Dumpsters, they never have to shut down," Beckmann said. "They just
keep eating."


-- Steve
º¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤º
Steve Chaney

Remove "whopper." to get my real email address

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Steve Chaney did not write that. It was a forgery from an anonymous
remailer by an anonymous coward. The real Steve Chaney uses

(Steve Chaney, NR's Tormentor ®)

and his sig line reads:

º¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤º
Steve Chaney

Remove "NRismykicktoy" to get my real email address

In , (Steve Chaney) did NOT write:

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

NR

http://www.pat-acceptance.org/kookrant.html
http://www.pat-acceptance.org/kookrant2.html

If I catch you busting into a mass and vilifying a church, the last thing
you'll hear in your entire life, will be the ratatatatat of an automatic.
- --Steve Chaney to Mark Ira Kaufman
Message-ID:

Young Mr. Chaney, the man who has told me that he wants to murder me and
sodomize women in my family, has said, repeatedly, that advocates for
choice had vandalized churches.
- --Mark Ira Kaufman
Message-ID:

she probably has to have her picture taken by satellite because no normal
camera can fit all that whale blubber into one picture.
- --Steve Chaney
Message-ID:

Excessively fat women look ugly. It is impractical to try and have sex when
she's 100lbs overweight and the weight is all fat - but most women ain't
that big.
- --Steve Chaney
Message-ID:

You of course do know what a lot of Asian women prefer, right? Besides,
after ****ing a cute asian chick, experience tells me it isn't all that
except that she looks good on your arm. In bed it ain't much at all. If the
lights go out, any guy whose hormones are more fixed on performance than
looks, is going to go to sleep right there and then.
- --Steve Chaney
Message-ID:

Clarice and Allisson were well beyond a BMI of 25 in their pictures where
they were called cows.
- --Steve Chaney
Message-ID:

If Dutton knocked on Steve's door and Steve shot him in the face, I would
really not care.
- --Crash Street Kidd about Steve Chaney
Message-ID:

Stephen A Chaney admits to sodomizing his daughter if he forges me now.


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