EDMONTON—Almost everyone loves a dramatic wildlife video, but are photographers doing enough to ensure their subjects are safe in the process? One bear researcher says some photographers are putting wildlife at risk as they chase social media hits over safety. Over the weekend, a harrowing and initially heartwarming video surfaced on Twitter giving the world a bird’s-eye view of a mother bear and her cub scaling a treacherous slope.Although it was shared by multiple accounts, a version on one user’s feed has pulled north of 17 million views, and climbing, capturing the cub repeatedly clambering up and sliding down a steep incline — and, at one point, nearly slipping off a cliff.Eventually, the cub was reunited with its momma bear, and an avalanche of online commenters praised the cub’s climb as an inspirational message about the power of perseverance. But grizzly bear researcher Clayton Lamb was quick to call out the video, which appears to have been captured with the help of a drone, as irresponsible, and possibly life-threatening to the bears.At one point, “the mother swats at the cub, which I interpreted as trying to move the cub away from (the) trajectory of the drone as it’s about to approach,” Lamb said of the video, referring specifically to the part when the footage zooms in on the cub just as it’s about to rejoin its mother at the top.“That’s what sends the cub way down the slope, and it almost goes into this cliffy area and the cub just scrambles out.”Currently based in Fernie in southern British Columbia, about 70 kilometres north of the United States border, Lamb, a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, studies grizzly bear populations in B.C. He identified the pair in the video as a subspecies of Ursus arctos, a member of the same family.Usually a female grizzly wouldn’t dare take a cub that young and small on such a steep slope, he said, questioning what (including ...
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