AI going on a bear hunt as attacks rise
It happens in seconds. As the truck and its two occupants picks its way down the forest road a bulky brown shape bounds towards the dashboard camera. Suddenly, it is on the bonnet, snarling as it tears off a wiper and cracks the windscreen.
The assailant is an Ussuri brown bear, Japan’s deadliest mammal, and its ferocious charge against a moving vehicle is just the most spectacular in a surge of sometimes deadly bear attacks on humans.
As bears wake from their winter sleep, experts are warning about the emergence of hungry animals whose habitat and traditional sources of food are being jeopardised by climate change – while Japanese authorities are turning to artificial intelligence to counter the rise in attacks.
In Tottori prefecture in western Japan, a trial is under way using images from security cameras, which will be analysed by AI to establish an early warning system for bears that stray too close to communities. The initiative comes in response to a record number of bear attacks: in the year to March, there were 219 victims of 193 attacks, six of whom were killed.
Last week in the town of Nayoro on the northern island of Hokkaido, a 50-yearold man had to repel an attacking bear with karate kicks. In October, a student in another part of the island was killed.
The dashcam footage was captured on Sunday on Hokkaido, where two men were going to forage for wild onions near the town of Nemuro. In the video, a young bear can just be seen. The truck had come between it and its 1.3m-tall mother.
The panicked driver can be heard shouting: “It’s coming, it’s coming! Good grief!” Both men escaped without injury.
For centuries bears have been shy and shadowy presences in Japan, only occasionally glimpsed in the mountains by hikers and hunters. But in recent years, there have been increasing reports of attacks on farms, livestock and people. – The Times