‘Safety over selfie’: National park visitors can't seem to stop getting too close to wildlife

Katharine Lackey | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Another person gored in bison attack in Yellowstone National Park After a tour group came too close to a bison in Yellowstone National Park, a woman was gored by the animal.

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – YOLO, FOMO, selfies: They are among the greatest dangers to visitors trying to get that perfect photo or video. People are getting too close and personal with wildlife, putting at risk not only their own lives but those of park creatures.

“People are in the YOLO today: you only live once, ‘I’m going to grab this one shot, this is my one chance,’” said Julena Campbell, spokesperson at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the most popular national park, with 11 million visitors a year. “We’re in that Instagram. We’re thinking of the instant and the moment, not how this is going to affect things down the line.”

As both the number of visitors to national parks and wildlife populations have increased in recent decades, humans and animals too often find themselves in close proximity, causing headaches for park officials eager to keep the wild in wildlife.

“When you interfere with wildlife ... sometimes those animals have to be put down, and that's really sad,” said Vanessa Lacayo, public affairs specialist for the National Park Service Intermountain Region, which includes Grand Canyon, Zion, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier national parks.

Yellowstone: Epicenter of bear and bison jams

Visitors getting too close to wildlife is especially pervasive in Yellowstone, the country’s first national park, where bison and bear jams routinely clog roadways and attacks by wild animals make national headlines every year.

"We’ve got more people and more animals sharing a landscape than any other park," said Neal Herbert, Yellowstone spokesperson. "We’ve got thousands of bison, thousands of elk, hundreds of grizzly bears all in a completely unfenced area where you can run into these animals at any time."

In Yellowstone, which averages 4 million visitors a year, bison injure the most people, at least one every year and five in 2015 alone. More mishaps may occur, but "many things go unreported," Herbert said.

Kirsten Leong and fellow scientists who combed through reports about people injured by bison found visitors are getting ever closer. "Selfies may have something to do with it,” said Leong, a former National Park Service social scientist who now works for NOAA Fisheries.

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When you take a selfie, “you're up close to a wild animal that you might be provoking, and you're turning your back on it,” Leong said.

Selfies aren’t the only danger. In June, a bison gored a woman in Yellowstone when a group of visitors approached within 15 feet of the animal, prompting it to charge. The attack followed two close encounters with elk the same week that also resulted in injuries.

People who purposefully get too close to wildlife face fines and jail time that vary by park but can be as high as $5,000 or six months behind bars, Lacayo said.

A vicious cycle

A single person dropping food or getting too close to wildlife can set off a chain reaction. “They start to learn that people aren't the threat and so then they stop reacting, and so this then causes a feedback loop where people think, ‘Oh, this animal's letting me get up close. It's kind of tame. It's OK. It's safe for me to get close,’” Leong said. “It might still be stressed out even though it's not physically running away or physically showing you any signs that there's anything wrong.”

Humans also introduce new foods, either through direct feeding or as trash, that can make the animals more susceptible to disease.

“I love Snickers bars, but if all I ate were Snickers bars, I’d be in really bad shape,” said Mark Biel, Natural Resources Program manager at Glacier National Park in Montana, which averages 3 million visitors a year.

The bad behavior is contagious. Visitors think, “If there are other people around me doing it, I’m not going to get injured,” said Katie Abrams, assistant professor of journalism and mass communications at Colorado State University. “There’s ... a little FOMO (fear of missing out) going on there.”

Animals frequently crowded by humans are more likely to lash out, increasing the chances they have to be put down. “There’s a whole bunch of bad things that happen once they start going down that road,” Biel said.

‘Don’t make it awkward, we bearly know each other’

Glacier National Park deploys a unique, four-legged ambassador to teach visitors about keeping a safe distance. Gracie, a 4-year-old border collie, chases wildlife away, particularly near parking lots and roadways where they're more likely to encounter people.

“It opens up that conversation – ‘What are you doing up here?’ ‘Oh, that’s such a cute dog’ – in a way that human-to-human conversations wouldn’t go,” said Lauren Alley, spokesperson at the park.

Great Smoky, where on average one person is injured each year by a bear, uses a novel way to get its message across: posters in bathroom stalls, where there’s a “captive audience,” Campbell said. In a lighthearted way, the "Bears need privacy, too" signs remind visitors to give the carnivores space.

Abrams and her team created a similar campaign in partnership with the park service in four locations – Grand Canyon National Park, Assateague Island National Seashore, Rocky Mountain National Park and Shenandoah National Park. The messages focused on making staying a safe distance from wildlife seem desirable.

The campaign used a bus length as a visual marker for how far people should stay away from specific animals and paired it with basic photography tips, catchy slogans like, "Don’t make it awkward, we bearly know each other," and tips on where to view wildlife from a safe distance.

“One of the key things we try to do in our campaign is to remind people of the experience they want to have in national parks,” Abrams said. “You can see animals up close at a zoo, but this is a national park, a place that’s really special and unique, and you came there for those reasons.”

The campaign succeeded in three of the parks by increasing the proportion of visitors who kept a safe distance from animals by 16 percent. In Grand Canyon, with more than 6 million visitors a year, it didn’t: Visitors stayed farther away, but not far enough.

Efforts to stop people from getting too close to wildlife is a reversal of experiences in Yellowstone in the 1960s, when visitors headed for open-pit garbage dumps in the park that attracted grizzly bears, which also regularly begged for food on the side of roads.

“Now if you said let’s go feed the bears, hopefully 90 percent or more of the people would say, ‘Hey that's a bad idea,’” Biel said.

A little help from the internet

Technology has its upside for the park system: People can do research to better plan their trips, get those safety messages before they hit the road and share their experiences on social media, Lacayo said.

When someone posts a close-up bison selfie, others often post comments that it is inappropriate and unsafe, Lacayo said.

“People love the selfie, and it's really hard to make sure that they're keeping a safe distance from wildlife in pursuit of that,” Lacayo said. “Safety over selfie is probably a No. 1 goal.”

Most importantly, visitors need to remember these are wild spaces, Leong said.

“It's not a zoo. It's not a garden. It's a national park,” she said. “Give these animals space, respect that it's their habitat. You're a visitor in their home.”