Bears - IUCN

The second observation I want to make is that we had four large black bear
skulls in our collection, and I did not observe one of them having any damage
to the skull at all. Mr. Free, I know has a good size collection of black bear
skulls in New York. Have you observed any damage ?
S. Free. They were damaged, but nothing that we could identify as having been
damaged by another animal. There were bullet fragments and such like, but
the most common damage was broken incisors and canines. As for having a
mashed-in front of the skull possibly due to chewing or clubbing by a paw, in
about 230 skulls the only damage we observed, outside of human interference,
would be the broken incisors and canines.
G. Wakefield. With respect to these broken incisors and canines, I observed
this once in one trapped bear that we had in a culvert trap. We were transporting
it to where it was to be released. This was a female that we were separating
from her cubs and she became so worked up that she started biting on the
bars at the end of the culvert trap and she bit on those so much that she broke
off just about every incisor on the upper jaw and both the gums on the upper
jaw and lower jaw were bleeding very badly when we got her to her destination.
N. Payne. With regard to cannibalism in black bears we had only one instance
this past summer on the program that we were undertaking in Newfoundland.
In trapping at several dumps we had some 89 captures involving 69 animals
and there was only one evidence of mortality that we experienced. This was a
cub which we had tagged, and had caught in an Aldrich leg snare. It was killed
by or presumably by abear, during the night. We had sometimes up to 7 bears in
snares during the night, around a single dump. But this is the only evidence
that we had of mortality by cannibalism. The bear had been eaten, and the rib
cage was exposed when we found it. It was a cub and it weighed 53 lbs with
some of the meat removed.
L. Miller. I'd like to make a comment on cannibalism. I have seen it twice in
brown bear. Once in 1961 when I was skinning-out a brown bear, I had another
one jump me off Of the bear and, instead of coming after me, he immediately
proceeded to eat the bear that I was skinning-out. Even when I hit him with
rocks, I couldn't run him off of it. The next day when I came back to retrieve
my gear, he had buried this bear and was lying on top of it and I had to kill the
other bear to get it because I couldn't run him off even by shooting right in
front of his nose.
The other instance was about three weeks ago on the Alaska Peninsula. We
were flying and saw a large bear eating a cub and had a hard time chasing it
off of it. Nearby we found the female with another cub. She was pretty scared
and we couldn't run her out of the brush at all.
I'd also like to comment on these skulls. We've been collecting polar bear and
brown bear skulls for the last ten years and have several hundred of each. I
would say that, probably, percentage-wise there is more damage in the
brown bear skulls as far as the jaws go. Some of them have very extensive
damage and obviously damage that they've lived with for years because it has
been healed over. In McNeil River in 1962 there was a big boar that had his
lower jaw completely hanging down, and it looked like he was about ready to
die. But we watched him for about a month and he did pretty good and next
year he was back again with his jaw still hanging down.
Over the years we've seen quite a bit of scars on our brown bears at McNeil
River and other places, some of them pretty extensive. Most were in the
shoulder areas and in the neck and head but it didn't seem to bother them as
they just went right ahead feeding.
254