A couple was killed in a bear attack in Canada’s Banff National Park on Friday evening.
In a statement, Parks Canada said it received an alert from a GPS device about a bear attack in the park around 8 p.m. local time. The alarm came from the Red Deer River Valley west of Ya Ha Tinda Ranch.
Officials said weather conditions did not allow the use of a helicopter, so the Wildlife Human Attack Response Team had to travel on foot. When they arrived in the area around 1 a.m., the couple was dead.
Kim Titchener, the founder of Bear Safety and More and also a friend of the couple, told Portal that the couple’s dog was also killed.
Team members killed a grizzly bear that was behaving aggressively near their bodies.
“This is a tragic incident and Parks Canada would like to extend its sincere condolences to the families and friends of the victims,” the statement said.
The identities of the victims were not immediately released.
Grizzlies, black bears found in Banff
Banff National Park in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta is known for being home to both black and grizzly bears.
Last month, a grizzly bear and her cub followed a group of hikers for several minutes. It is unusual for grizzly bears to approach groups of people on a trail, but the bears did not attack in this incident.
Last week, “The Boss,” a large, 650-pound grizzly bear who was known to have eaten a black bear and survived a collision with a train, forced some homeowners to cut down their fruit trees after he showed up several days in a row to eat crab apples, CBC reported.
Titchener told Portal that fatal grizzly bear attacks are extremely rare and only 14% of attacks worldwide result in deaths. Although it’s not clear what sparked this attack, Titchener said most bear attacks result from surprise encounters.
“That’s actually just the reason why we’re seeing more attacks because more people are going outdoors and unfortunately they’re uninformed about it,” she told Portal.