ASHEVILLE - It's time to put the myth of the bear paw bandit to rest.

Since August, theories about a mysterious population of three-legged bears in Asheville have swirled on social media and made headlines as far afield as the UK. The conversation is driven by a Facebook page called Help Asheville Bears, which argues the injuries are the result of an illegal trapping operation. The managers of the page say they've identified 11 black bears with missing paws or limbs.

District biologist Justin McVey, who works for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, said such injuries are likely caused by car collisions.

Meanwhile, one could ask why would someone take only a single bear paw?

Followers of Help Asheville Bears remained skeptical — how could a vehicle strike cause a bear's limb to pop off with what appears to be surgical precision?

'Sure enough, it survives'

Colleen Olfenbuttel is the state's black bear and furbearer biologist at the Wildlife Commission. She's studied black bears in North Carolina, Massachusetts and Virginia for over 20 years and has seen what happens when a black bear is hit by a car.

When the Wildlife Commission receives a report of a vehicle collision, staff visit the site of the crash to collect biological data and assess the bear's health.

"At this point, I've handled over a thousand live bears and thousands of dead bears," Olfenbuttel said.

She's confident that Asheville's three-legged bears are suffering from something much less exotic than poaching for traditional Asian medicine.

"The photos we've seen, they're very much indicative of injuries we've seen from collisions with cars," Olfenbuttel said.

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She's examined the carcasses of "hundreds of bears" killed by car crashes. But for sleuthing out what happened to Asheville's three-legged bears, Olfenbuttel draws from her experience documenting bears that manage to recover from devastating wounds.

"When we do see an injured bear — say it got hit by a car, and it's still around the roadway — our preference is to give that bear a chance to live," Olfenbuttel said. "Now, in some cases, we will euthanize the bear if those injuries are just too severe — we want to put the bear of its misery," but often they'll stand back and allow the bear's natural resilience to see it through.

"I've seen injuries in which I'm like whoo, boy. ... We'll give that bear a chance to survive but we'll see what happens," she said. "And sure enough, it survives. But guess what, it's missing part of its leg. That's the (origin story of the) three-legged bear."

Mechanics of an injury

"Bears, unlike deer and some other animals, tend to survive collisions," Olfenbuttel said. "It's just their mass, the way they're built. They have a lower center of gravity."

"Sometimes they get hit broadside, but most injuries are to the front or the rear," she said. "A lot of times they get hit on their front legs because they're kind of trying to backpedal to avoid the car. And they succeed in getting almost out of the way, but not quite.

"Or they hurry up. They're racing across the road, and they see a car coming in, so they try to hurry up and they get hit in the rump or the rear legs."

The breaks can occasionally heal if they're low on the leg, but if the fracture is significant or the bone is shattered, "it's eventually going to come off."

"Bone is separated from bone," Olfenbuttel said. "So it's not attached to anything. The only thing attaching the lower broken bone to the upper bone is skin. And more likely than not that skin is damaged as well. There's abrasions."

"Shoot, (the skin) might be torn," and often the bone itself sticks out of the limb, Olfenbuttel said. "And guess what, that's not going to stay over time. That's basically going to get lost by the animal.

"It's not going to around with a floppy leg its whole life. It's going to eventually slough off."

In other cases, the paw or limb isn't lost to a broken bone. Severe skin injuries — comparable to what can happen to a motorcyclist's leg as it scrapes along pavement in an accident — can also create a tripod.

Certainly, some of these injuries could have been caused by other accidents, Olfenbuttel said — like a curious yearling sticking its paw into a dumpster and getting severe cuts from trash metal. But in her decades-long career conducting population studies on black bears, she's never heard of a case of a trapped bear gnawing off its foot to escape.

"Collisions with cars are the number one cause of mortality (for bears) around Asheville," she said.

Surviving and thriving

How do the tripods fare? Olfenbuttel pointed to the original video from the Facebook page, involving a mother bear in Arden missing most of her left foreleg.

"People were concerned about her, but she had three cubs that looked to be healthy, her coat was nice ... It looked like whatever injury she had had healed."

"When they heal, it looks good. It's going to look clean. So whereas the bear's own natural ability to heal is the reason that wound looked clean, people instead viewed it as 'Oh, it's paw got cut off by a trap, or someone cut its paw,'" Olfenbuttel said

"A lot of those bears, the injuries looked old. They seem to be not only surviving, but thriving," Olfenbuttel said. "They had adapted. They had coped with it."

WRC's response to public concerns

Many of the pictures that have circulated on social media aren't clear enough for positive identification, Olfenbuttel said. It can be hard for a trained biologist to definitively determine two pictures are of different bears, much less members of the public.

"We couldn't even verify how many of those bears were individual bears, let alone if they were even from North Carolina," she said.

The Wildlife Resources Commission received repeated requests to investigate an orphan cub and a hurt yearling from people who said they learned about the animals through the Help Asheville Bears Facebook page.

"But this injured yearling ... we would ask people, 'Where is this bear? We will investigate!' and no one could tell us where. They just said, 'Oh, well, I just saw it on Facebook," she said.

What you can do to help

If anything, Olfenbuttel said, this episode has "really emphasized the need for people to slow down on the road."

"Hey, if you really want to help bears out, implement the six BearWise basics," she said. "Live responsibly with bears and basically reduce the neighborhoods as attractants for these bears ... If they're attracted to your neighborhood, they're going to be crossing roads to get there."

"If you think you have an orphan cub, please call us directly," Olfenbuttel said. "We do investigate those," she said, but not all solitary young bears need help.

"One, we don't want to abduct the cub (if the mother is still nearby). Also depending on the time of year — now that acorns are dropping, sometimes we encounter cubs at this time of year that actually can do fine on their own," she said.

They bring truly orphaned or injured cubs to two rehabbers, one at the North Carolina Zoo and another in the Piedmont who has raised black bear cubs for over 25 years.

"Asheville has been a wonderful city for our agency to work with — not only the city, but the citizens," Olfenbuttel said, pointing to the Urban/Suburban bear study that's been in play since 2014. "We've had so many wonderful landowners, homeowners, neighborhood subdivisions, HOAs, that we've worked with.

"Asheville cares about their wildlife and their animals," she said.