10/10/2026
A Minnesota logger shot every black bear that came near his camp for years. Then he started feeding them. Eighty years later, wild bears still come to dinner on his land.
In 1942, Vince Shute was running a logging camp in the woods near Orr, Minnesota, south of what is now Voyageurs National Park. Black bears kept breaking into the cookshack. Shute and his crew were afraid of them and shot every bear that showed up. Over the following years, he killed scores of them.
Then he tried something different. He set out a batch of sourdough pancakes away from the cabins and waited. The break-ins stopped. The bears did not. They kept coming back for the food, and Shute kept putting it out. He ended up feeding them for nearly 50 years.
Locals called him the Bear Man. He got to know individual bears the way a rancher knows cattle. His favorite was Duffy, a large male who became famous after the Associated Press photographed him eating cinnamon toast out of Shute’s mouth. Another big male, Brownie, kept younger bears in line at the feeding site. Shute called him my cop. When a hunter shot and wounded Brownie, Shute nursed him back to health on chicken noodle soup.
Word spread, and the problems followed. Visitors started showing up uninvited, throwing junk food and trash to the bears. People poured alcohol down bears’ throats. Parents put their children on the bears’ backs for photographs. A woman asked repeatedly if she could pet a bear, was told no, and on her way back to the parking lot ran her hand down one’s back. Kim McGrath of the American Bear Association said it was lucky the bear was tolerant. Had it been Oscar, she probably would have lost an arm.
In 1995, volunteers formed the American Bear Association and built a raised observation deck to separate people from bears. Shute died at 86. Today the sanctuary has no fences and no cages. About 80 wild black bears pass through each summer. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people watch from the decks between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Staff feed the bears dried fruit, nuts, and seeds from green buckets so the bears associate food with the bucket, not with people.
The sanctuary is still controversial. Feeding wild bears violates every principle of modern wildlife management. A bear that associates humans with food is a bear that shows up on someone’s porch, and a bear on someone’s porch usually ends up dead. Members of the nearby Bois Forte band have raised concerns that the feeding makes bears too comfortable around people, leading to conflict in surrounding communities. A Voyageurs National Park brochure puts it plainly: do not ever feed a bear. The next visitor may be a 3-year-old with a jelly sandwich.
The sanctuary’s answer is that they did not start this. They are managing a situation Vince Shute created decades before anyone understood the consequences. Steph Horner, president of the American Bear Association, said cutting the bears off now would push hungry animals that have known this food source their entire lives toward resort tourists who are not bear-aware. We can manage the bears, Bill Lea of the association said. It is the people who are the challenge.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: KAXE / Midwest Weekends / American Bear Association / Steph Horner / Bill Lea / Kim McGrath.
