Colorado euthanized 294 bears in 2026, three times its 2025 total
Wyoming, like other states, has seen a significant uptick in encounters between humans and bears, with the increase recorded this year in at least 15 states across the US revealing a national picture of more numerous and intense encounters, The Washington Post reported. The Guardian’s account drew on data from Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico and Wyoming.
Dan Thompson, supervisor of the large carnivore section of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, said the number of bears he and other state workers have to kill this year is on pace to be among the highest on record. Thompson’s work includes capturing mountain lions, wolves, black bears and grizzly bears to study them. “I have always been personally intrigued with carnivores and their role throughout any ecosystem,” Thompson said. “I actually feel very fortunate to get paid to do what we do.”
Still, like most jobs, there are tasks he does not enjoy but must do: grappling with attacks and human injuries, having to sometimes put animals down and then facing the public blowback. “None of us got into this job to kill the animals we love,” Thompson said.
Nate Bowersock, a biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation who chairs BearWise, a coexistence organization, said bear populations had been drastically reduced by persecution and habitat loss during the 19th and 20th centuries. Since then, restricting hunting and preventing the complete clearcutting of forest ecosystems — instead, just doing sustainable logging — has caused bear numbers to grow over the past 50 years, Bowersock said.
Human development has expanded during the same period. The National Park Service recorded 268 million visitors in 1994 and 331 million in 2024. “We definitely are seeing more people moving into areas where bears are common, and so that does lead to more encounters,” Bowersock said.
This year, the western US experienced a warmer winter and severe drought conditions, limiting the berry and acorn crops that bears rely on to rebuild fat after hibernation. “Their whole lives revolve around recovering from hibernation and preparing for hibernation, and they have really high caloric needs and so when they can’t find their natural food sources, they have to go look for alternatives,” Bowersock said.
Connecticut has tracked a steady increase in bears entering homes over the last decade. The state received fewer than 25 such reports per year from 2014 through 2020, and at least 60 in each of 2022, 2024 and 2026, according to state data.
In Florida, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission fielded an average of about 2,500 bear-related complaints annually from 2006 through 2010, the agency said. From 2021 through 2025, the average had more than doubled to more than 6,400. Black bears were once designated an “imperiled species” in the state; population growth led Florida to allow a black bear hunting season in 2025 for the first time in a decade.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife has reported more than 8,600 bear sightings and incidents this year, more than double the 2025 count, according to the agency. Colorado has euthanized 294 bears so far this year, three times last year’s total, and has confirmed 10 bear attacks — its highest annual figure on record. Recent incidents include a black bear biting a woman on her forearm through her tent, and a black bear entering a condominium through a bedroom window in the middle of the night and scratching a woman.
In August in New Mexico, which has also seen more encounters this year, a bear killed a 67-year-old wildland firefighter inside his home. Wes Larson, a bear biologist who hosts the podcast Tooth & Claw and maintains a popular Instagram account, said depleted natural foods have effectively pushed bears toward higher-risk foraging. The depleted natural food sources have, Larson said, “pretty much forced [bears] to take higher risk food opportunities, so stuff like going into communities and getting in the garbage or maybe investigating a campsite or even investigating a person as maybe a potential source of food.”
Despite the increases documented this year, attacks remain rare, according to BearWise. The organization advises residents not to leave pet or human food outside, to keep garbage in bear-resistant containers and never to feed bears. In the backcountry, the group recommends carrying bear spray and storing food and toiletries in bear-resistant containers rather than tents, and facing down an approaching bear by holding ground, waving arms and shouting “hey bear” until it leaves. Such measures don’t just save people; they help keep bears alive too.
Thompson said bears that have learned to associate people with food are rarely returnable to wild behavior. “Once bears have obtained food rewards that they associate with people, we call that human-food conditioning. Once they are at that level, we are going to have to put that bear down,” he said. But with proper precautions, seeing a bear in the wild is not necessarily cause for alarm.
“If they have done a necessary amount of education to where they know how to respond to a bear, it puts them in a headspace that they can then enjoy that encounter rather than be afraid,” said Larson, who has received more photos and videos of bear encounters this year than ever before. “In a perfect world, I would love that every encounter between human and bear is full of wonder and awe. But unfortunately, there are some that become a lot scarier or even violent.”
Thompson, who has been with the Wyoming department for almost two decades, said he expects this year’s high removal numbers to ease as removed animals fall out of the population and weather returns to normal. “I have seen over the years and decades that things ebb and flow,” he said. “The high level of animals that were removed in conflict, that takes those out of the equation, right? And so for all those reasons, I would not expect this to be the norm.”