Arkansas Man Seriously Injured in Rare Black Bear Attack

On September 3, 72-year-old Vernon Patton suffered serious injuries after being attacked by a black bear in Franklin County. According to CBS Channel 5 News, Patton had been spreading gravel at his property in Ozark when he was attacked without provocation by a 70-pound juvenile black bear. He was airlifted to nearby Fayetteville Hospital before being transferred to the University of Arkansas hospital in Little Rock.

Arkansas Game and Fish wardens were able to track and euthanize the bear after Patton’s son witnessed the attack, and biopsies of brain tissue revealed that the bear was not infected with rabies or distemper, diseases that can cause unusual and aggressive behavior.

It’s hard to overstate how rare an attack like this is. AGFC official Trey Reid said, “I’ve been at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission for almost 20 years and have never heard of a black bear attack on a human. An unprovoked attack, it’s just unheard of, honestly.”

“Unheard of” is the right way to put it. For perspective, about 200 people are struck by lightning every year, and about 20 of them die. In contrast, research has shown that only about one or two people are killed by black bears every year, and all of those deaths are caused by full-grown adults. Non-fatal attacks are much more common, at about twelve per year, and are typically caused by female bears protecting their cubs, while fatal encounters are almost always predatory attacks by males.

All this tells us that the odds of being killed by a juvenile black bear make winning the Powerball look like an everyday thing. Unsurprisingly, bears habituated to human food have more run-ins with people, and the bear who killed Patton did have human food in its stomach.

The reason black bears have fewer violent encounters with humans than brown bears has to do with the habitat they evolved in. Biologist Stephen Herrero, a leading authority on bear attacks, has consistently observed black bears staying close to trees throughout their life cycle. The species originally spread throughout North America in the dense boreal forests that took root after glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age.

Herrero concludes that a black bear’s first response to danger is to simply retreat up a tree. Brown bears, in contrast, evolved in the open plains of Eurasia and continued to prefer that habitat in North America. With nowhere safe to retreat to, their first response to a threat is often to attack. Although brown bear cubs climb trees, by the time they’re adults, they don’t tend to do so.

The location of the attack that killed Vernon Patton is notable, too. Starting in the 1840s, Arkansas became known as the Bear State, named for the density of bears there and the stories of bear hunting that became popular in hunting magazines of the time. Because the Mississippi Delta region of the state underwent uncontrolled flooding well into the late 1800s, it was one of the last remaining forest regions in the South after most others underwent clear-cut logging. By the late 1920s, black bears had been extirpated from the region, with as few as 35 bears remaining in the entire state.

Then, between 1958 and 1968, black bears were brought into the state from Minnesota and Manitoba, Canada, in what became the most successful reintroduction of a large carnivore in history. Contemporary estimates put the number of black bears in Arkansas at around 5,000 and steadily growing.

Vernon Patton’s family released a statement in response to his death. “This has been an extraordinarily difficult time for our family, and we are deeply grateful for the outpouring of support we have received. We ask that people show compassion and consideration as we focus on being together as a family for as long as we still can. We also want to extend our heartfelt thanks to the medical teams who are providing exceptional care and to everyone who has offered their prayers and kindness.”