Drones & robots deployed against rising wolf & bear attacks in India & Japan

Intensive bear hunting has not reduced bear attack deaths in Japan

LUCKNOW,  India;  TOKYO,  Japan––“Forest rangers in India have deployed drones to track wolves after nine people,  mostly children,  were killed by the animals in recent weeks, officials said Sunday,”  reported both CBS and Agence France-Presse on December 1,  2025.

The CBS and Agence France-Presse reports went on to describe the deaths of a 10-month-old girl,  “who was snatched by a wolf in Bahraich district of northern Uttar Pradesh state on Saturday while she was sleeping beside her mother,”  and the death of a five-year-old boy who “a day earlier, was snatched in plain sight of his mother from outside their home.”

Japan sends army after bears

The wolf attacks in India were disclosed just over a month after New York Times correspondents Javier C. Hernández and Kiuko Notoya reported from Tokyo,  Japan,  that “More than 100 people have been injured by bears in Japan this year,  and 11 have died,  a record.  Now the government is preparing to dispatch the military to Akita Prefecture,  in the mountains of northern Japan,  to help set traps and dispose of the carcasses of dead bears.”

To most of the world,  the Indian wolf mayhem and Japanese bear mayhem might be no surprise.  No mammals figure more often in scary roles in myth and literature,  chiefly originating in Europe and Asia,  than wolves and bears.

Yet readers aware of U.S. wolf and bear attack data cannot help but wonder what has gotten into the Indian wolves and Japanese bears lately.

U.S. wolves & bears much less often dangerous

After all,  the U.S.,  about three times the size of India,  with more than 17,500 wild wolves between the Lower 48 states and Alaska,  probably hosts more than six times as many wild wolves as India,  which has only 2,000 to 3,000,  chiefly in the Himalayan foothills.

Yet 32-year-old schoolteacher and runner Candice Berner,  killed by wolves while on a training run on March 8, 2010 near Chignik Lake,  Alaska,  was the first and only U.S. fatality attributed to wild wolves in at least 138 years.

(See The myth of the big bad wolf: the truth of living among wolves & wolf history.)

No one else has been killed by wolves in the U.S.,  or even badly injured by wolves,  in the 16 years since.

The 300,000 to 400,000 black bears and 30,000 grizzly bears in the U.S.,  most of the latter in Alaska,  have over the same 115 years killed an average of 2.8 humans per year.

This is about 25% as many people as the estimated 44,000 Asian black bears and 12,000 Ussuri brown bears in Japan,  close cousins to the North American grizzly,  have killed this year alone.

Genetics?

Genetics matter,  and might partially explain the difference.

North American black bears split genetically from the several Asian black bear species about three to four million years ago.

North American wolves are about 700,000 years separated from the several Asian wolf species.

But North American grizzly bears and Asian brown bears are genetically almost identical,  according to research published by iScience on July 18,  2025.

Thus,  while genetic differentiation may explain some behavioral differences among North American and Asian wolves and bears,  acculturation––of both the bears and wolves and the Indian and Japanese human victims––probably explains most of the rest.

Habitat change may have a lot to do with changing wolf and bear behavior,  too,  but the effects of global warming in the form of drought,  wildfires,  and other effects on the wolf and bear populations appear,  overall,  to be approximately equally distributed from continent to continent.

Rabid wolves

Also worth noting is that wolf attacks in India and bear attacks Japan tend to follow familiar but distinctly different patterns.

Until the latest Indian wolf attacks,  wolf predation on humans in the first 25 years of the 21st century have been sporadic and relatively rare “crimes of opportunity,”  seldom killing more than one person in one place at a time.

Most wolf attacks with multiple human victims,  moreover,  have been by rabid wolves.

A rabid wolf in July 2007,  for instance,  bit 16 people in two villages near Nalgonda,  in Telangana state,  central India.

Another rabid wolf in September 2010 reportedly injured 28 people in one village and 23 in another near Anantapur in Chittoor state,  just south of Telangana,  before being beaten to death by a mob.

In February 2013 a rabid wolf bit 12 people in three villages near Nayagram,  West Bengal,  before being killed by a mob.

Common to the predatory attacks is that they occur at night,  in remote locations,  where poor people are sleeping outdoors or in rudimentary tents and shacks near the fields where they work.

Common to the rabid attacks is that wolves already in the furious phase of rabies enter villages in broad daylight,  that they would normally avoid,  where large numbers of people are congregated and vulnerable.

“Don’t feed the bears”

Bear attacks in Japan tend to be officially blamed on “a shortage of food in the animals’ mountain habitats,”  also commonly blamed for bear incidents in the U.S.,  but––as likewise in the U.S.––human behavior has contributed to a relatively steady increase in bear/human conflicts,  too.

Some of it involves suburbs expanding into formerly remote bear habitat.

Some involves humans feeding bears,  either deliberately or accidentally via improperly secured trash,  the placement of bird feeders and beehives,  and doors or car windows accidentally left open.

Signs warning “Don’t feed the bears!” have been prominently placed around Yellowstone National Park at least since 1905,  amplified by the Yogi Bear animated cartoons since 1958,  but similar messages may not have caught on in Japan,  at least not to the same extent.

Hunting vs. bear attacks

Hunters argue that the biggest difference between bear behavior in Japan and in the U.S. is simply that U.S. hunters kill 40,000 to 50,000 bears per year,  instilling fear and avoidance of humans in the surviving bear population.

But hunters actually kill barely 10% of the bears in the U.S. per year,  and the shooting is seasonal,  not all year long.

Moreover,  a third to a half of the U.S. bear population are young enough at the start of each bear season to have never been shot at.  Maybe their mothers taught them to avoid humans,  but maybe their mothers also taught them to raid trash cans and eat yard fruit.

Japanese hunters kill more bears

Japan has bear hunters too,  who though far fewer than U.S. bear hunters,  shoot bears more aggressively.

The total number of licensed Japanese hunters dropped from 517,800 in 1975 to 200,141 in 2017,  before rising back up to 218,500 in 2020,  only about 40% of whom are licensed to use firearms as opposed to traps.

Few as Japanese bear hunters were and are,  they killed 4,340 bears in 2006,  then believed to be about 60% of the total bear population,  and killed 9,099 in 2023-2024.

Probably because so many bears were killed then,  the toll dropped to 5,136 in 2024-2025.

Non-lethal approaches

Japan has experimented with non-lethal approaches to bear control.  At least three Karelian bear dogs have been imported since 2004.

The town of Takikawa,  on the northern island of Hokkaido,  in November 2020 claimed to have prevented bear attacks by deploying two “Monster Wolf” robots to chase any bears seen in town.

As of September 2023,  the “Monster Wolf” robots were still working,  BBC correspondent Derek Cai reported,  but video shows the robots only scaring feral pigs,  deer,  and macaques.

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