A black bear walked through an unlocked door in north Asheville, injured the woman inside, and was scheduled to be killed. Then 21,500 people signed a petition asking the governor to pardon her. She is going to a zoo instead. She also still has not been caught.
What happened
On August 18, a north Asheville resident was hurt when an adult female black bear came into her house through an unlocked door. Three cubs were on the front porch. The woman was treated at a hospital and released.
The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission said the bear posed a threat to human safety and planned to capture and euthanize her.
Then it became a campaign.
- Asheville wildlife advocate Hannah Furgiuele started the Dolly the Bear Campaign.
- A Change.org petition asking Gov. Josh Stein to pardon Dolly passed 21,500 signatures.
- The bear was named for the late Dolly Parton, an Appalachian native like her.
- On September 18, the commission reversed. If Dolly is darted and taken alive, the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro will hold her while advocates look for a permanent sanctuary.
Two of her three cubs have been captured. Dolly has not.
The number nobody in the petition mentions
Here is the part that complicates the story, and it comes from the commission rather than from critics.
Dolly has entered nine homes.
And she is not an outlier. There have been more than 250 instances of bears entering homes in Buncombe County since 2017. More than a third of all wildlife problem calls in North Carolina come from that one county.
Bears are also in what one regional wildlife expert called super mega eating mode. In the fall, black bears enter hyperphagia, a stretch of weeks where they try to eat as much as 20,000 calories a day before denning. A garbage cart is not a temptation to a bear in September. It is a job.
The council meeting
On September 22, residents came to Asheville City Council and said the city is the problem, not the animal.
If we don’t have real systemic and infrastructural shifts I think we’re going to keep hearing the same story in Asheville.
Hannah Furgiuele, who started the petition
Resident Janice Riordan, citing the wildlife hotline data, put it in three words: we are the problem. Liz Thompson told the council it is time to update how the city responds to an animal that represents these ancient mountains.
They asked for two concrete things: real public education on securing food and garbage, and designated zones where bear-resistant trash containers are required.
The council took no action.
The BeezLoop Take
The campaign to save Dolly worked, and the thing it was fighting was real. Killing a bear for doing what bears do in a town that leaves food out is a genuinely bad answer, and 21,500 people were right that the commission’s first instinct deserved to be challenged.
But look at what the energy actually bought. One bear gets a zoo placement. The trash ordinance that would prevent the next nine home entries got heard by a city council that did nothing with it. That is the whole story of American civic attention in one week: a name, a face and a petition can move an agency in a month, and a boring infrastructure rule about garbage carts cannot get a vote. Dolly is saved. Asheville is unchanged. The 251st bear is already on its way through somebody’s unlocked door.
It is also worth being honest that a woman was injured in her own house, and she is nearly absent from the coverage. The petition has a name for the bear. It does not have a name for her. You can believe the euthanasia order was wrong and still notice that the sympathy in this story flowed in exactly one direction, and that it flowed toward the party who will never read about herself online.
The inconsistency is the part that should bother people who care about animals. We covered a Colorado bear that broke into a home and started a kitchen fire. It was euthanized. There was no petition, no campaign, no zoo offer, no name. Same species, same behavior, different outcome, and the variable was not the bear. It was whether somebody in town was willing to build a brand around it. That is not a wildlife policy. That is a lottery.
The fix here is unglamorous and everybody already knows what it is. Bear-resistant carts in the zones with the calls, enforced, plus a fine for leaving attractants out. Asheville has the data to draw the map. What it does not have, apparently, is a council willing to annoy people about their garbage.
The question
If 21,500 people can move a state agency in under a month, why can the same town not pass a rule about trash cans? And what happens to the next bear, the one nobody names?
Related: Dolly Parton died last year at 80, and her manager took her nephew to court four weeks later.
Sources: Blue Ridge Public Radio on the council meeting · WLOS · FOX Carolina · NC Wildlife Resources Commission
