Photo: File photo

The Village of Lumby is sounding the alarm over garbage bears.

The Village of Lumby is sounding the alarm over garbage bears.

“The area between Catt and Mountain View is seeing a lot of bear activity related to garbage left out,” said a post on the Lumby Facebook page.

"A reminder to everyone that putting your garbage out early can put people and animals at risk. Please refrain from putting garbage out until the day of the pick-up."

Residents are allowed to leave garbage containers out from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on their pick up days.

Any garbage that is not collected must be returned to the property and properly stored.

Conservation officers warn that a garbage bear is a dead bear.

Bears who become garbage-conditioned and human-habituated bears cannot be released back into the wild and have to be put down.

“They keep coming back continually, they're not seeking out natural food sources and they lose their fear of people,” CO Sgt. James Zucchelli said in an earlier interview with Castanet.

“Then there's this defensiveness that the bears will display a defensiveness of the garbage or the food source and that's where the public safety gets put at risk,” he said.

“They do not scare away and they continually keep coming back. They become conditioned to these non-natural food sources, human food sources that are so high in caloric value they're addicted to it and they just keep coming back.”

While many people question why the bears can't be placed further away from human populations, Zucchelli said that once they get that food source in their mind, they are just going to keep coming back to that.

“Plucking them off into the wilderness, everybody thinks that these bears would be in a happy place. They end up either getting killed first in that habitat or they end up trying to get back to the location where they were relocated from and getting into trouble along the way.”

“It's a very difficult situation for us to put ourselves in, the conservation officer doesn't want to go out and have to kill garbage conditioned bears ... We end up being the bad guy trying to come in and deal with the public safety aspect of it. ”