Ultimately, to satisfy the public, the fanciful name has to be discarded for a common-sense one, a manifestly descriptive one. The Great Bear remained the Great Bear—and unrecognizable as such—for thousands of years; and people complained about it all the time, and quite properly; but as soon as it became the property of the United States, Congress changed it to the Big Dipper, and now every body is satisfied, and there is no more talk about riots.
—Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897
If Grafton is New Hampshire’s unruly stepchild, Hanover is its favorite daughter, the one that gets cookie after cookie pressed into her politely outstretched palms. The charming town of about eleven thousand people lies about thirty minutes and several income brackets north of Grafton; it benefits from politically connected town administrators and representatives who ensure that the town’s soccer moms, racquetball dads, and stock portfolio managers receive largesse in the form of crisp roads, attentive environmental managers, and multimillion-dollar grants.
Hanover is the seat of Dartmouth College, where award-covered college deans churn out ribbon-covered graduates whose purpose is to funnel alumni donations back to their ivy-covered alma mater. Far from being plagued by T. gondii, researchers at Dartmouth’s medical school are the ones who have studied and isolated different genetic strains of the parasite.
One of the nice things about Hanover (and the town is simply awash in nice things, from low-cost violin concertos to free public tours of the historic Shattuck Observatory) is that it has achieved, through aggressive zoning, a fantastic balance between development and green spaces. On Dartmouth’s infamous fraternity row, one can witness the debauchery of undergraduate house parties while outside a deer and her fawn pick their way delicately along the neatly manicured lawn. Stately mansions are herded into compact residential neighborhoods bounded by forests that are made more appealing by the Appalachian Trail, the Connecticut River, and the meticulously tended trails of the Greensboro Ridge Nature Preserve.
Another natural resource in Hanover is Mink Brook, a cheerful little waterway that winds through the town’s woodlands.
Right around the time Tracey Colburn was attacked in Grafton, a bear began climbing the steep bank that defined the Mink Brook Nature Preserve and sampling the bird feeders and compost bins of Hanover’s upper crust.
Because the bear lived in Hanover, she was given a name, and because she favored the brook, the name she was given was Mink. The bear became a celebrity, a local media sensation.
With neighborhoods full of college students who were just about as careful with their discarded pizza and Chinese food containers as one might expect, Mink got very people-friendly, very quickly. She knocked down bird feeders. She climbed into dumpsters, sticking her head up from inside to watch warily as humans walked past.
Mink’s boldness was largely attributed to an elderly realtor who liked to set out large piles of food to watch Mink eat. Eschewing the bargain basement grain and supermarket doughnuts that made do in Grafton, he put out high-quality black-hulled sunflower seeds and maple-glazed crullers purchased from the same diner bakery that fed Dartmouth professors. When her benefactor died in 2016, Mink began plaguing the rest of the town like an indigent widow, now with three young cubs in tow.
By then, Mink and her cubs were really pushing the limits of acceptable bear raiding. They wandered into and out of garages in search of food. Mink once sat beneath a zip line at Hanover High School, watching the kids pass above her head like a sumo wrestler keeping a close eye on a sushi conveyor belt. She attacked a dog, injuring it badly. One of the bear cubs even got into an outdoor hot tub, apparently not realizing that said tub was already occupied by a nine-year-old girl, who screamed bloody murder as both escaped uninjured.
Mink’s riling of the rich led to a firestorm of indignation and histrionics—some of Hanover’s choicest residents were outraged at the bear’s incivility toward humans, while others were outraged at the outrage directed at an innocent wild creature. As the outrage cycle built, people looked down their noses from horses so high that they could barely be seen by the mere mortals crawling upon the surface of the earth.
But there was one thing every outraged individual understood: clearly something must be done about Mink, and the Fish and Game Department obliged.
In 2017, after a couple of the cubs entered a residential home in Hanover, Andy Timmins, New Hampshire’s bear biologist, and other game wardens set traps to capture the whole family, with the intent of euthanizing them. Timmins, making the case for euthanasia, explained that once a bear has become accustomed to people, it can be extremely difficult to break it of its foraging habits. “When their behavior reaches a certain point, it is tough to be wild bears again.”
The eminently reasonable explanation was met with, predictably, outrage.
It’s unsurprising that no one liked the idea of bear euthanasia, a protocol that evolved in the shadows of wildlife management because of chronic underfunding. But no one had ever rubbed Hanover’s nose in the ethical murk of killing a bear.
In short order, doctors were writing letters to area newspapers, asking that the bears be spared. Similar pleas appeared on popular Dartmouth College websites and in media sources, and two different “Save Mink” petitions gathered nearly thirteen thousand signatures.
In Grafton, public opinion had split between shooting and not shooting the bears. In Hanover, the schism was characteristically different—some people wanted the government to spend a lot of money to modify Mink’s behavior, while other people wanted the government to spend a lot of money to capture and relocate Mink and her cubs to someone else’s backyard.
It being Hanover, both sides got what they wanted.
With elite state players pulling all the political levers at their disposal, Governor Chris Sununu got involved. He countermanded his own state biologist’s expert opinion and instructed Fish and Game to come up with a plan that would allow the bears to live.
And so, during Memorial Day weekend, the three yearling cubs were captured and relocated to Pittsburg, a remote town in northern New Hampshire along the Canadian border. Mink, meanwhile, disappeared from the area to find a mate.
The public furor died down until the spring of 2018, when Mink strolled back into town, this time with four new cubs trailing along behind her. She promptly began to raid bird feeders and garbage cans again, teaching her foraging tactics to her new brood. Euthanasia was even more strongly recommended now, but the idea was a proven nonstarter.
The outraged Hanoverites knew just what to do: spend more money.
And so, in 2018, an intergovernmental task force that included Hanover deputy fire chief Mike Hinsley, Timmins, and a federal official from the US Department of Agriculture’s bear management program sedated Mink and fitted her with a radio tracking collar and a brightly colored ear tag so that her every movement could be tracked.
Some residential areas set up the equivalent of a neighborhood watch, but instead of looking out for criminal activity, they policed bird feeders and untidy garbage receptacles. When there were Mink sightings, Hanover town officials sent out a “Code Red” mass text to residents, asking them to be extra vigilant about attractants, and Dartmouth sent out similar messaging to its students. Residents were told to keep barbecue grills inside, take down bird feeders, and keep their trash cans secured until the morning of municipal trash pickups, rather than put them out the night before. These directives were enforced with a $500 fine, and the town also recommended that people consider bear-proof garbage containers, at a cost of $280.
Hinsley became the point man of the Mink-deterrent campaign. When my employer, the Valley News, sent me on a ride-along with Hinsley, we cruised slowly up and down residential streets in his SUV, looking for evidence of human food sources and talking with people on the street about Mink’s latest movements.
At one point, he pulled over and set up an antenna and directional tracking system, which pinged at him with varying degrees of speed and strength, allowing him to zero in on Mink’s location in real time.
Whenever he caught Mink straying into human neighborhoods, he confronted her, using methods taught to him by bear whisperer Ben Kilham—maintaining eye contact, talking firmly, and walking toward the bear to express dominance. Mink’s potentially lethal naughtiness persisted into June, at which point she was captured and relocated about two hundred miles north. Her four new cubs were taken to a bear rehabilitation orphanage run by Kilham.
The contrast with bear management in Grafton could not be more stark. A bear’s life in Hanover is threatened, and the state moves heaven and earth to find it and treat it in accordance with the wishes of the public. A bear threatens a woman’s life in Grafton, and the state makes a half-hearted effort to capture it before the incident quickly fades from the public imagination.
In my correspondence with Andy Timmins, he acknowledged that there was nothing built into the state’s bear management system that prioritized cases in which bears actually injured humans or dogs.
“We are hesitant to call these ‘bear attacks,’ because we don’t view them as such,” he said. “However, physical contact between a bear and a person is not the norm, and we should probably be putting those events in a file.”
He said that, after my inquiries, he intended to create a specific form that would capture “not-attacks” by bears.
“For me, some of my delay in creating this form is my concern over the fact that a lot of people want to make bears into aggressive marauders,” he said. “I maintain that they are not. My experience is that most of the time when bear-human contact has been made, people (often with dogs) have put bears in a position where they feel directly threatened and they react defensively (swiping, swatting).”
He also said that the lack of documentation regarding Colburn was due in part to how the data was structured—it was designed to track actions taken to alleviate bear conflict, not the severity of any particular conflict. In Hanover, the saga of Mink was, surprisingly, not over. Her radio collar showed that in 2019 she found her way back to Hanover by a very circuitous route that involved traveling more than a thousand miles and crossing the Connecticut River. The story made national news.
“I’m back bitches,” said Mink (according to a Twitter account in her name). “Where the donuts at?”
After Mink made the long journey home, people were braced for more hijinks, but surprisingly, she exhibited no unusual behavior toward people this time. The months she spent traveling had apparently taught her to prefer a paleo diet that prioritized acorns over pizza crust.
Mink’s story demonstrates that, in a place with strong civic engagement, aggressive enforcement of best practices with regard to human food attractants, and political will, even a worst-case scenario of human-habituated bears can be resolved in a way that makes everyone happy.
The problem is that state and local officials can’t afford to leverage that kind of effort everywhere. And until they do, bears will be effectively managed only on the doorsteps of the elite.