This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In the early 1900s, long before smartphones and selfie sticks, tourists flocked to Yellowstone National Park—not for the geysers or scenery, but for a grotesque show: a nightly spectacle of grizzly bears raiding cafeteria scraps from open-pit landfills like desperate, starving pirates.
The bears were in dangerous proximity to humans: Hungry bears tore at open car windows. Tourists posed a little too close with their film cameras. Yellowstone park rangers logged dozens of injuries each year—nearly 50 on average.
Eventually, the Park Service ended the nightly landfill shows: Feeding wild animals human