Polar bear shot dead after venturing into a residential area on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula

A polar bear that ventured into a residential area on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula this weekend triggering a public safety alert has been shot and killed, authorities said Sunday.

The Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police, said they were first called to the town of Madeleine-Centre on Saturday morning after residents reported seeing a polar bear near their homes.

Sophie Bonneville, owner of the local café in Grande-Vallée, said her husband was walking their dog in the morning when a polar bear appeared less than 30 meters from their house.

“It was my dog, Boris, who saw the bear first,” Bonneville said, adding that the dog was so scared that he tried to run to his family’s barn.

“The bear didn’t move for a couple of seconds, and then it turned to go back into the woods,” he said.

Sylvain Marois, commander of the southeastern district of the province’s Wildlife Protection Agency, said a team of rangers and a rescue team were involved in the search, as well as a helicopter and several drones.

Mr. Marois said the bear was finally located at 8:15am on Sunday after a report of a sighting just off Route 132 in Madeleine-Centre. About 15 minutes later, the polar bear was dead.

“We’re not proud of that kind of thing,” Mr. Marois said. He said his equipment can safely neutralize and transport smaller bears like black bears, but polar bears are a different story.

“A bear like this can run up to 60, 70 kilometers per hour, and they are very aggressive,” he said.

Marois said polar bears have occasionally been seen in the coastal regions of Quebec’s lower north shore and in areas such as James Bay, but not on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River.

Polar bears live on Arctic sea ice and only choose to live on land during Canadian summers, when the sea ice melts, said Alysa McCall, a staff scientist with Polar Bears International. But she said polar bear sightings could become more frequent as more Arctic sea ice is lost due to climate change.

“This, of course, is of great concern to Canadians because we have two-thirds of the world’s polar bears and we have many, many small coastal communities, some of which have never seen polar bears in the past, but now could be. seeing some in the future,” he said.

Polar bears, he said, are mobile animals, which means they are bound to end up in unexpected places. But if the polar bear spotted in Quebec this weekend “turned around and maybe followed its nose to the wrong place or not, this is an absolutely unusual place to see a polar bear,” she said.

Safely removing and transporting polar bears back to their habitat is no easy task.

A polar bear trap can cost more than $10,000, and the costs of lethal and non-lethal deterrents and helicopters to properly monitor bears can add up quickly. Cities like Churchill, Man., which are famous in Canada for their polar bear populations, are more likely to have the funds, resources and trained professionals to safely remove polar bears from public spaces.

But Ms McCall said it would not be fair to expect smaller communities to have the equipment or money at their disposal to catch polar bears safely at any time.

“Non-lethal options are great, but ultimately, of course, human life comes first and foremost,” he said. “One thing that needs to happen in the next few years is broader support for these communities with more options on how to deal with polar bears.”

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