My Neighbor, the Bear

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Two men are digging up dirt on the shoulder of the road into Shatin village, shovels in hand, when we ask whether they had seen any bears recently. One of them, Gevorg, laughs at the question. “Yes, yes, of course,” he says. They’re residents of this village, some of our best residents. No matter the hour, a bear can be found roaming these streets, he says, apparently unbothered by its human surroundings.  

Gevorg points his shovel at a house across the road, flinging some of the wet dirt from the street in the process. Bears broke in there and ate 15 chickens, he says. He points again to a house a few doors down. A bear killed that guy’s sheep. 

Absurd as it might seem, these clumsy-looking animals are surprisingly agile, making them effective burglars in this typical Armenian village. They can maneuver over walls and fences and plunder village backyards. They climb up walnut and apple trees, snapping off branches while they scramble toward precious morsels of food. They claw into apiaries and raid bee hives. They tear through dozens of hapless hens and rabbits at a time, leaving a trail of broken necks and feathers, often too full to finish eating what they’ve killed. Bears wreaking this kind of havoc are very much a reality here in Shatin village, a 1,700-person settlement above the banks of the Yeghegis River, and the largest in the string of villages nearby. In the past few years, environmental organizations have recorded hundreds of incidents of bear-related mischief in this village and around the Vayots Dzor region. Unsurprisingly, the residents of the village are not happy sharing their streets with these wild animals, and many seek to attack the problem with gunfire. On the other hand, environmental organizations are betting on electric fences and community education to mitigate the growing conflict. 

I’m walking through the village with Tsovinar Hovhannisyan, environmental programs coordinator at the Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets (FPWC), a conservation group that has worked in this area for years, trying to manage the growing collision between humans and bears. 

Situated just below Shatin village, the Yeghegis River used to provide the protein the bears needed: lots and lots of fish. Now, the river is obstructed by 17 small hydropower plants. These structures rely on natural river flows to generate electricity, and in doing so, have siphoned off more than half of the river’s flow. Some of them have passages for the fish to move, but where one plant ends, another one starts, and the river simply doesn’t have enough space to flow, Hovhannisyan explains. Locals say the river’s trout used to be abundant, but have now disappeared. 

With no fish, and wild fruit being an unreliable source of food in the mountains, the bears cross the river into the village instead, and find that a kind of supermarket awaits them. Everything humans have a taste for, the bears want, too: honey, walnuts, fruit, chicken, rabbits, and even sheep. Mother bears bring their cubs and teach them that the village is an easy hunting ground, and so the habit passes along generations. Some in the village believe feeding the bears might make them go away, since they arrive hungry. Hovhannisyan says in earlier interviews with residents, people admitted to leaving out cookies and other sweets. 

The bears, meanwhile, don’t seem to have anywhere else to go. In 2015, a team of wildlife biologists set out to find the bear population in Vayots Dzor. Using camera traps, they found a density of about 60 bears per 1,000 square kilometers. Hemmed in by roads, shrinking forest corridors, inaccessible terrain and other infrastructure, the bears have nowhere to expand. “We think they’re trapped here,” Hovhannisyan says. “They don’t distribute.” With successful breeding seasons adding to the population, the number of bears continues to grow. Each mother typically has three cubs, she says. 

Behind all the hooliganism are brown bears, which are native to Armenia. These bears have endured decades of mistreatment. Kept in tiny cages for entertainment, or hunted for sport, they have long been exploited by humans. Soviet-era policy didn’t outright ban hunting the bears, and the population declined through those decades, with widespread poaching and unregulated hunting continuing throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Protections have since tightened considerably, and with the bear in the Red Book, hunting or poaching carries a large fine. Despite the deterrents, Hovhannisyan tells me several bears are still shot in this valley each year. 

Walking along the main road of the village, we come across a group of eight or so men. Again I ask, have you seen any bears? “Of course we have,” one answers. A day or so earlier, a mother and her cub had been plodding around this very street, he says. Another beckons me over and shows a video he captured of three cubs a few months back. Under the headlights of his car, the little cubs are bounding down a dirt road. Two of them veer left while the third stops, confused, before running straight on. A second video shows a mother bear rearing onto her hind legs on the village’s main road, before dropping back down and running off. The man filming from inside the car laughs. 

While I’m being shown the videos, Hovhannisyan has introduced herself to the group, and their pleasant curiosity quickly turns into something more tense. “They’re hungry and they’re coming to our village,” one says angrily. They climb up the apple trees, even before there’s any fruit on them, they snap the branches beyond recovery, he says. “It’s affecting our livelihood.”

Hovhannisyan asks whether they do anything to keep the bears away, and there is a pause. The bear is in the Red Book, one of the men finally says. In other words, fighting back is not an option. And when asked if they would prefer to simply hunt the bears, they don’t answer directly. “Is the bear worth the same as a human life?” one asks. “If a bear comes for your property, can’t you just shoot it?” No, Hovannisyan says, it’s banned by law. The remark elicits a collective grumble. “At some point [authorities] need to turn a blind eye, not everything can be solved with fines,” one says, “they’re hurting humans.” 

One of the men, who turns out to be the village’s mayor, asks whether they can be compensated for damages. 

This is a sticking point for environmental groups working here. Hovhannisyan says her organization prefers not to focus on paying out every time a branch breaks, because of corruption risks. “Everytime something is killed or broken, they get a payment, and it happens again, and they get paid again,” she tells me later. She recalls working with another NGO on a compensation scheme that fell apart. A resident would say he’d lost five chickens, they would pay, and he would spend the money elsewhere, leaving him with no chickens and no way to stop the next attack. People often inflated their losses, too: “When you don’t have the infrastructure to prevent the bear from attacking, the compensation won’t work.”

But there’s no doubt that the bears are indeed causing damage. Data from the first nine months of 2020, for example, logs roughly 13 million AMD of damage (about $36,000) in Vayots Dzor, about 2.4 million AMD of which came from Shatin village. Residents there made 36 claims, including damage to bee colonies, calves, chickens, cattle, cherry trees, mulberries, walnuts, apples and peaches. Hovhannisyan says reports of damage typically range from 12 to 20 million AMD per year in the Vayots Dzor region—a figure which has stayed the same over the past few years, but looking at the past decade, has significantly increased. Part of the reason is because the incidents were underreported, she says. No one was calling emergency services because nothing could be done, now there is more awareness and more possibility for compensation.

While financial loss is the residents’ main complaint, the bears do occasionally threaten human safety, especially for people working fields or gathering wild herbs. Each year, one or two incidents of bears attacking humans are recorded. 

FPWC’s own approach leans away from compensation and toward deterrence. Alongside funding electric fences, the group plants wild fruit trees to give bears an alternative food source, follows up on reports of bear incidents with the regional municipality, and educates residents on keeping dogs or growing thorny blackberry plants to discourage bears from approaching homes. 

A little further along the road, at a small restaurant just beyond the village center, we meet a man with a very different perspective. “Actually, you can say that this is not our land,” he says, “but this is their land.” His property backs onto the river, likely to be one of the first stops the bears make into the village. “You could say that the bear lives here during mulberry season, walking around, eating, sitting under the balcony, he feels very comfortable, and I’m very happy.”

“We’ve fed them more than 100 times, as if they’re our dog,” he says, “we’ve given them lots of bread.” Hovhannisyan scoffs at this. Bread isn’t good for a bear’s health, she says. 

Last year, he didn’t enjoy any of the fruit from his trees, since the bears ate them first. “All these animals, my heart hurts, in Armenia there are so many animals in the Red Book, and they won’t come back, because our people are meat eaters.” 

I ask if he knows of people shooting bears in the village. “I wouldn’t say that,” he says. “I can’t imagine a man that would hit a bear.” After years living around Europe, he says his perspective on animals changed. “I’ve never tried to scare them.” 

I left that conversation thinking I had found the one man with a positive perspective toward the bears. That the worst thing this person had done was feed a bear bread out of misguided kindness. But, like many other times reporting in Armenia, things are not what they seem. The day after we returned to Yerevan, I received a text from Hovhanissyan saying that he was known to the environmental protection authority for killing an otter and for rigging his own DIY electric fence, far above the usual voltage used to deter bears, and strong enough to be deadly. 

We visit one more village house, where Armen Karapetyan lives with his family. Last year, a bear broke into his property and killed 25 rabbits, which he says are worth 5,000 AMD each, along with a number of chickens. 

Karapetyan’s solution is a scrawny, white dog, about the size of a football, that wouldn’t scare off anything by its size alone. But bears, hearing a bark, get spooked. “Here is our guard!” Karapetyan says, smiling and gesturing to the wiry dog with its high-pitched yap. Since bringing the dog home, the family hasn’t had another encounter with a bear. 

It’s the kind of simple fix that Hovhannisyan hopes more residents will adopt. But not everyone has found their version of Karapetyan’s bear-deterrent, or has the means to get one. “For the others who are struggling to raise kids, struggling to live, a bear is another obstacle,” Hovhannisyan says. “When you’re not struggling, you care about the things around you, animals, environment, you can envision a future, but when you struggle, it’s only day-to-day survival.”

Environment