Why Gatlinburg’s Funny Bear Videos Hide a Real Crisis

Quick Take

• Bears can smell a food wrapper from miles away, and that one fact explains everything going wrong in Tennessee's most popular tourist town. How food smells drive bear behavior →
• Those viral bear videos are funnier than they are alarming. That changes once you learn what typically happens to bears that get this comfortable around people. What happens to habituated bears →
• Gatlinburg has already passed new laws to deal with its bear problem, though they may not be enough. Gatlinburg's new bear laws →

To say the town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee is surrounded by bear country is an understatement. As the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Gatlinburg offers impressive vistas, excellent skiing opportunities, and up-close-and-personal encounters with bears. As this Instagram video shows, bears feel quite at home in this small mountain town.

In the video, three bears climb over a parked truck, presumably in search of some tasty garbage. As the video caption explains, the person filming even honked their car horn several times to scare the bears away. While these videos from Gatlinburg represent an amusing moment for viewers, they also illustrate a growing crisis in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Gatlinburg Ground Zero

A cursory search on social media for Gatlinburg bears results in a slew of videos, each showing bears getting dangerously close and comfortable with the town’s residents and visitors. There are even videos of bears casually roaming through Gatlinburg’s downtown while it’s packed with tourists. The growing comfort level of bears in the area may make for amusing videos but it also represents a serious problem.

Tennessee’s black bear population has grown significantly in the past few decades. In places like Gatlinburg, where tourists and wildlife overlap, danger occurs. Gatlinburg’s bear problem has become so severe that new rules have been enacted regarding dumpster and garbage collection. Furthermore, a new Tennessee state law makes it illegal to feed black bears.

As this Instagram video shows, bears have become so accustomed to people in places like Gatlinburg that they have slowly lost their fear of humans. The result is shocking incidents like this one, where three bears almost tip over a truck while attempting to find food inside.

Bear Battleground

Bears don’t like to interact with humans. If anything, they only show up in populated areas because they can’t pass up the prospect of easy food. Bears have an incredible sense of smell, one that allows them to detect a food source from over a mile away. By some estimates, they can smell as far as 20 miles away. This makes a tourist town like Gatlinburg, a stone’s throw from Great Smoky Mountains National Park, something of a hotspot for hungry bears.

All of the town’s dumpsters provide easy calories, which draws plenty of curious bears. As towns like Gatlinburg grow, so does their urbanization and infrastructure sprawl. This human growth fractures bear habitats, leading to an increasing number of close calls between people and bears. As countless videos illustrate, Gatlinburg has been dealing with this issue for a while. As bears grow more comfortable with human presence, it only leads to bolder and more extreme bear behaviors.

Bears forced to look for human food sources due to fragmented habitats are victims and should not be treated like enemies. In the end, many of the bears that get too close pay with their lives. As this Instagram video shows, locking doors doesn’t stop bears from encroaching. A radical overhaul of both conservation strategies and the tourist mindset is necessary to protect these bears.