But humans made them more carnivorous.
On the subject of grizzly bears, the San Francisco Call—a short-lived newspaper that went out of print in 1913—wasn’t what you’d call kind. Describing the 1898 downfall of a California grizzly nicknamed Old Reel Foot, a supposedly 1,350-pound “marauder and outlaw,” an unnamed journalist cataloged the bear’s sins.
Despite its drama, the account was typical for the time. Especially in the years following the Gold Rush, newspapers and other historical records billed California grizzlies as an unusually meat-loving, bloodthirsty bunch. If California grizzlies were ever anything like the horrors our predecessors made them out to be, they didn’t start out that way. Before Europeans arrived on the West Coast in 1542, the bears thrived on diets that were roughly 90 percent vegan, as Alagona and his colleagues found in a study published this week.
The California grizzly isn’t the only wild creature whose diet humans have made more meat-centric. Coyotes and condors also boosted their carnivory after the arrival of Europeans. In modern times, Charles Robbins, a bear biologist at Washington State University, and his colleagues have documented brown bears in Yellowstone beefing up their consumption of elk calves when native vegetation and fish grow scarce—due in part to human activities, along with diseases and pests that people introduced. Mairin Balisi, an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist at the Alf Museum who’s studying the diets of urban carnivores, suspects that similar changes may be playing out in today’s raccoons and rats—maybe foxes and bobcats too.
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The Atlantic