The Trouble With Bears.

Kenzo Kudo got in his car one day last May and drove out to a mountain near Sapporo, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, to look for wild vegetables. He never returned. Police found his body a few hundred meters away with bite marks on his legs. What happened, they surmised, is that Kudo had the misfortune to run into a brown bear. Police found the alleged perpetrator--male, 5 or 6 years old, two meters tall and weighing 130 kilograms--ambling around a few yards from the crime scene and shot him. The case is freakish by any measure. The bear apparently was trying to save the body for a future meal, odd behavior for a creature that until recently was content to forage for berries. "That hardly happens anywhere in the world and it should be viewed as an anomaly," says Steve Braun, a Montana-based biologist who also studies Japanese wildlife. "It's no reason to kill every animal in the area-- just the one that crossed the line."

Tell that to Hokkaido residents. The Japanese like their furry animals as much as anybody, but they're out for blood following an increase in bear encounters, which often lead to maulings. Some farmers have taken to shooting the bears, which on Hokkaido is perfectly legal. While bears in Alaska or British Columbia are protected by rulebooks a few inches thick, Japan's bear-management guide runs a few sentences, says bear biologist Yoshikazu Sato of Japan University in Tokyo. "If the bear eats or damages crops, the farmer is allowed to shoot it, no problem. And he doesn't even have to shoot that same bear; he can shoot any one he sees." Conservationists now worry that the open season on bears could put them on the list of endangered species.

These are rough times for the brown bear (Ursus arctos yesoensis). A cousin of the North American grizzly, it was once revered by Hokkaido's native people, the Ainu, as a forest god. Tsutomi Mano, one of Hokkaido's premier brown bear researchers, thinks that the local bears have gentler temperaments than other grizzlies, though some experts and most local people seem to disagree.

The problem is that on Hokkaido, more people and bears now live together in tighter quarters than anywhere else on earth. There are 5.6 million people and between 2,000 and 3,700 bears on an intensively farmed island about the size of Pennsylvania. In recent years the bear population has been falling due to rapid urban sprawl, which is putting bears and people on collision course. Some of the recent maulings occurred within 30 kilometers of Sapporo, making headlines in the city of 2 million.

About 250 kilometers outside Sapporo, in the heart of bear country, Sato slows his rusted pickup to point out where a brown bear climbed up and then collapsed a thin, wire deer fence. Sato has been using radio telemetry, DNA analyses for hair and scat, geographic ...