Rangers closed part of a trail along the Blue Ridge Parkway after a bear attacked and fatally injured a hiker\u2019s dog, the National Park Service says.<\/p>\n
The incident was the first of a series of encounters between hikers and bears that occurred near Asheville, North Carolina, between mid-May and early June; the NPS has not specified exactly when each incident occurred. In an email to the Charlotte Observer on June 23, the park service said that an unleashed dog near the Bull Mountain Trail \u201cprovoked a bear to attack a leashed dog that sustained serious injuries.\u201d Following the attack, the leashed dog\u2019s owners took their pet to a veterinarian, who euthanized the animal due to its wounds.<\/p>\n
Following the fatal attack, two more hikers reported \u201caggressive\u201d encounters with bears in the same area. One hiker reported that a bear had bluff charged her and her leashed dog; another hiker who was traveling alone reported that a bear had bluff charged him. As a result, the NPS announced last week that it would close a half-mile section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail near Bull Mountain until June 30.<\/p>\n
In a press release, NPS wildlife biologist Tom Davis said that while \u201cthese early season encounters are not out of the ordinary,\u201d park officials wanted to take the opportunity to remind visitors about steps they can take to keep themselves safe.<\/p>\n
Chief among those steps: keeping their dogs on a leash, which the Blue Ridge Parkway requires. Despite many hikers\u2019 belief that dogs help protect their owners from wildlife, pet canines have provoked multiple bear attacks on both themselves and their owners in recent years. In a 2014 paper in International Bear News, prominent bear researcher Stephen Herrero analyzed news reports on 92 black bear attacks on people and found that more than half of them involved a dog<\/a>, including a whopping 91 percent of the attacks by females with cubs, which almost never attack humans unless provoked.<\/p>\n Furthermore, Herrero wrote that while he couldn\u2019t consistently tell which dogs had been unleashed, reporting suggested that in the \u201cvast majority\u201d of cases, the dogs had been loose. His advice to hikers?<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re out there in bear country, probably you should keep your dog under control,\u201d he told the CBC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Authorities say the unleashed mutt provoked the bruin, and have closed a popular trail near Asheville<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124399,"featured_media":2637788,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"uuid":"35763197478d8e2cf264ce9c05838c98","footnotes":""},"categories":[2542],"tags":[2822,2634,2720,2706],"byline":[1120],"ad_cat":[],"legacy-category":[],"class_list":["post-2637785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hiking-and-backpacking","tag-bears","tag-hiking-and-backpacking","tag-syndicated","tag-wildlife","byline-adam-roy"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Rangers Warn Hikers After a Bear Kills a Dog in North Carolina","url":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/outdoor-adventure\/hiking-and-backpacking\/trail-closed-after-bear-fatally-injures-hikers-dog-near-blue-ridge-parkway\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/outdoor-adventure\/hiking-and-backpacking\/trail-closed-after-bear-fatally-injures-hikers-dog-near-blue-ridge-parkway\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/bear-in-undergrowth_h-150x150.jpg","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/bear-in-undergrowth_h.jpg"},"articleSection":"Hiking","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"POM Administrator"}],"creator":["POM Administrator"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online","logo":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/favicon-194x194-1.png"},"keywords":["bears","hiking and backpacking","syndicated","wildlife"],"dateCreated":"2023-07-01T14:00:05Z","datePublished":"2023-07-01T14:00:05Z","dateModified":"2023-07-01T14:00:05Z"},"rendered":"