Please Be Bear Concious!

I follow the Yosemite blog on my Google reader. Today I saw a post referring to another blog. It's a Yosemite Ranger who blogs all bout his California Black Bear stories. This one made me so sad and angry! I just don't get why people can not be responsible! Seriously!!! If you can't be responsible then you shouldn't be allowed to camp in Bear Territory! Once we were camping and some idiot left this cooler on the picnic table and dog food in the back of his truck…despite al the signs asking to store your food in the bear boxes! So what do you think happened…yup the bear came to visit his campsite..not once, but twice!Come on people, those boxes aren't just to protect your food, but to keep the bears alive!

This is from jeffreytrust.com:
The next year, I was working one night when we received a report of a bear (who turned out to be Yellow 53, a yearling on his own at that point) near Lower Pines Campground. Since he was out of the campground, we didn’t bother him, and he soon disappeared. Expecting that he might come into the campground once it got dark, we talked to everyone to make sure they stored their food. Meanwhile, Yellow 53 ambled over a nearby bridge and left the area. He’d had his chance to get into Lower Pines, but he walked all the way around the campground and over a bridge to go somewhere else. This is what bears are supposed to do, and I actually remember feeling proud of him! Maybe he’d be unlike his mother! On another night shortly after, I was working once again, and I ran into my partner as he told a woman not to forget the bag of trash she still had hanging out.
Hours later, as I was walking through Upper Pines Campground, checking on food storage, I found Yellow 53 eating from the trash bag that this woman my partner had reminded had never put away. The bear treed, and when he finally came down, I chased him away. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time Yellow 53 got human food on his own, and all because this woman, despite the reminder, still managed to forget to throw away her trash.
And thus a downward spiral began. He was active that year, less so the next, and then very active the following two years. He knew by then that getting human food was far more efficient than eating only natural foods, despite the occasionally annoying person who actually tried to scare him away. He could sneak into campsites with people just a few feet away and grab their food. As time went on, he was so comfortable doing this that visitors had a hard time scaring him away (although, I always found him easy to scare away).
He was a smart bear, like his mother. Orange 19 once banged a bear canister against a rock for 45 minutes until the lid popped off. Yellow 53, on the other hand, went around opening up unlocked car doors… using the door handles.
I (and many others) spent quite a lot of time trying to undo the consequences of that woman forgetting to throw away her trash. I even got an award for it, but all Yellow 53 got was more and more food. He got so close to people so often, and may have injured one (or more) people, that we were beginning to think we’d have no choice but to kill him. We tried moving him, we tried aggressively using a shotgun with rubber slugs or bean bags to scare him, we tried to improve food storage. But, in the end, none of these things made a difference, and we had to kill him. It was a very sad day. He was perhaps my favorite bear.
So, a few nights ago, I was walking through Upper Pines when the wildlife techs, just a loop away, found a sow with three cubs in the campground. And what were they doing? Eating from a trash bag someone had forgotten to throw away.