Woman Charged by Grizzly in Yellowstone Gets Jail

Thanks Roibert, I've been lucky enough to visit Yellowstone but had no idea how strict they are about wildlife.

An Illinois tourist spotted taking photos of a grizzly bear and her cubs pleaded guilty to willfully being within 100 yards of wildlife and will spend four days in jail. She's also barred from Yellowstone National Park for a year. Samantha Dehring told the court she regrets putting herself and other tourists in danger, KRTV reports, and has suffered emotionally from social media attacks over her standoff with the grizzly.

 
The rules/laws in National parks are there to not only protect the animals , but also to protect people from the animals.
Any wild animal mother will react un-predictably.
If that mother bear had attacked the woman, it is likely that mama bear would have had to be "put down".
 
senior chef said:
The rules/laws in National parks are there to not only protect the animals , but also to protect people from the animals.
Any wild animal mother will react un-predictably.
If that mother bear had attacked the woman, it is likely that mama bear would have had to be "put down".
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Agree with you!!
 
I lived and worked just outside of the Park for a few years back in the 70s. Looks like the Park Service has gotten a lot more serious about all of this. I recall stories of people doing some pretty stupid things. Like a man trying to get a bear into his car so he could get a picture of his wife sitting next to it. Course he may have had other motives! In the 60s as a kid I remember feeding the bears out our car window, one crawled up on the hood and looked at us eyeball to eyeball through the windshield. I don't think that kind of thing was illegal or even discouraged back then...

Grizzlies are not as dangerous as a lot of people believe, but there are fatal encounters from time to time. More often fatal to the bear, but not always. Important to keep them separated from the tourists.
 
Bears look so cute and cuddly. I heard so many vicious, sickening horror stories about grizzlies when I lived in Alaska!
There is a reason third graders walk to school with a rifle over their shoulders!
I've heard stories that made me cry!
It happens so quickly! They can be 50 feet away and on top of you in a second!
 
Fooling around with wild animals is Very Unwise....especially bears and buffalos. Years ago, in Canada, I was video taping a huge bull Elk, and he started coming towards me. I remained very still, and got a fantastic video of him standing just a few feet away and "bugling". I stayed very still, and he finally turned away, but I almost soiled my britches.
 
Don M. said:
Fooling around with wild animals is Very Unwise....especially bears and buffalos. Years ago, in Canada, I was video taping a huge bull Elk, and he started coming towards me. I remained very still, and got a fantastic video of him standing just a few feet away and "bugling". I stayed very still, and he finally turned away, but I almost soiled my britches.
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This moose seemed to respond to yelling by backing off twice, but then decided to attack. I probably would have turn around & gone the other way.
 
Me and my older brother and our cousin, in our teens, were up in the Sierras when a bear cub wandered through our camp site and my cousin ran up behind it - ran up behind it, grabbed it by it's tail, and trotted behind the poor, scared thing for a few minutes. Fortunately, my cousin didn't mauled by it's mother. Unfortunately, he was well-mauled by my older brother. We never took him with us again. You can't take stupid people camping with you.
 
Seems to me there's no end to people doing stupid things in our national parks. Yesterday there was an article about a woman being severely burned (probably dead by now) because she let her dog run loose in Yellowstone Park, the dog jumped into one of their boiling hot springs, the woman jumped in to rescue it, the dog died, and as of yesterday the woman was in critical condition.

The park has plenty of signs warning people that the water is boiling hot.

And you could probably fill a big fat book with stories of people being mauled, killed, etc. by wild animals that the people thought it would be fun to go near. Gotta get that picture, even if it means losing your life! Messing around with a bear cub, or even worse, the mother of a bear cub, is the ultimate in stupidity.
 
Yellowstone has a big problem with people that want to pet/hug the buffalo. They are very large dumb animals. The Rangers have to work hard to keep control.
 
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