By Lee Ross

Mountain View Telegraph

An East Mountain couple has declared a paintball gun war on bears.

In an effort to defend their Transylvania naked neck chickens from a bear, Jamie Anderson and her husband, Rick, developed a system of lights, bells, a baby monitor, fencing and a paintball gun.

The intended message to the bear is that he is not welcome.

“I think the best thing to do is, when a bear comes, it doesn’t have a good time at your house,” Jamie said.

 Some may balk at the notion of attacking a bear with a paintball gun, but Jamie says she checked to make sure the balls are biodegradable and nontoxic, and her method is endorsed by Jan Hayes, founder of the bear-awareness and wildlife preservation group Sandia Mountain BearWatch.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Hayes said. “I would like to see (the Department of) Game and Fish do more of this sort of thing.”

Hayes calls it “hazing,” and suggested that, after trapping a bear, the state department do things like shoot rubber bullets at the bear and hit it with pepper spray.

“Just make life absolutely miserable so that that bear, right then and there, knows it’s not welcome,” she said.

Another part of that effort is removing any ideas a bear may have about humans and food being related. Hayes recently brought 10 BearWatch volunteers to the mountains for two days’ work, spending about $400, to stencil “Feed a bear, kill a bear. Don’t leave food unattended!” on more than 500 tables, inside bathrooms and on the bear-proof trash cans in picnic areas in the Sandia Mountains.

In spite of that, a picnic basket was recently left unattended and snatched by a bear, leading to the closure of the Cienega, Sulphur and Doc Long picnic areas, which may last for about two weeks. What may have contributed to the problem is an abundant acorn crop near the picnic area, but Hayes said people need to be more vigilant.

“It’s frustrating after all that work we did that a woman left her food unattended,” she said.

For her part, Jamie is trying to avoid having her home as a food source for bears.

“You always remember where you got your groceries,” she said. “(And) the area is getting more and more populated. It gets hard for (bears). I really believe that there will come a day when my husband and I are old and we tell people there used to be bears.”

Her husband, a contractor, knows what it feels like to be hit by a paintball. He’s used it on his construction crew and had the favor returned, Jamie said, coming home with “plum-sized black knots.”

“They hide in their leaf-colored suits and play and act up,” she said.

Jamie’s home in the Cedar Crest backs up to the forest, in an area bears inhabited before she did, Jamie said. She said she hopes bears don’t make it a regular stop, but she and her husband have paintballed the same bear that broke into their chicken coop twice now.

Although none of the animals was harmed, the couple beefed up security after a fence was destroyed. They added a stronger fence, rodeo cowbells, lights, installed a baby monitor in the coop for early detection. The most recent incident was in mid-September.

“He had paint spots all over his little bum,” she said, adding that that’s the area her husband aims for, not the head. “We really didn’t think he would have come back.”

Although time will tell if their efforts are effective, Rick is already keeping score. He has the gun “notched,” on the handle, with one coyote and one bear.