Katie Fletcher, 3, holds her miniature Chihuahua, Casper, that fell prey to a bear at her family's Eagle River home. PHOTO PROVIDED BY GINGER FLETCHER

Ginger Fletcher, 36, lives off Greenhouse Street in Eagle River Valley alongside her three siblings and parents who built on plots of land homesteaded by the family decades ago.

Fletcher said the area has always seemed like an ideal place to raise her three children: Katie, 3, Colby, 6, and Chris, 16. She said she landscaped her yard last year creating an ideal area for her children to play with their many cousins on the family's 10 acres.

Bears are common in the area, Fletcher said, but she never imagined one would be so bold as to prey on her family's 9-month-old miniature Chihuahua, Casper.

She said Casper, weighing 3 pounds, was an indoor dog that only went outside to go to the bathroom or lay in the sun for a couple of hours on warm afternoons.

Casper was leashed outside for a few minutes to relieve himself around 6 p.m. Aug. 1 when it caught the attention of a black bear passing through the family's yard.

"He hadn't been out very long, and my son was getting ready to get him," Fletcher said. "My two little ones started screaming, 'There's a bear, there's a bear.'"

Fletcher said her youngest two children were kneeling on the living room sofa looking out the window when they noticed the black bear. She was in the kitchen when she heard them yell that the bear had taken an interest in the dog, which had begun to bark.

"He was a little dog, but he didn't really bark that often," she said. "I really didn't even hear him barking, so, I mean, it wasn't that much of a bark."

But it was enough to catch the bear's attention.

"When the dog started to bark, the bear turned around and started coming for the dog," Fletcher said. "He grabbed the dog and ripped him, basically, off the leash in front of my kids."

The gruesome scene caused a panic in her children, especially Chris, who began screaming for the bear to put down his dog.

"He was screaming so loud that a car that was going by Eagle River Road heard the screaming," said his grandmother, Evelyn Johnson. "He didn't know what was going on, and he called 911, and the police came."

Chris's screaming also caught the attention of his uncle, Kurt Johnson, who grabbed his gun and drove to the Fletchers not fully realizing what was happening.

Fletcher said she was recovering from knee surgery and was trying to respond as quickly as she could to protect and shield her children from the scene unfolding before them.

"He started to tear the dog apart in the front yard to eat it, and that's when I was trying to keep the kids away so they wouldn't see what was happening," she said, adding that she called her parents for help.

"By the time we got there, the bear was on the hill eating the dog," Johnson said. "We were going to shoot it, but by then the dog was dead. There wasn't anything we could do."

Anchorage area wildlife biologist Rick Sinnott said the family would have been legally within their rights to shoot the bear, but he would advise extreme caution in such a situation.

"You're allowed to shoot a bear in defense of life or property," he said. "Obviously if it's attacking a dog that would be the time to do it, but you have to know what you're doing," he said, adding that a misfired gun in a residential area could pose more of a threat to humans than to a bear.

Sinnott said it's not uncommon for bears to pass through Eagle River as a thoroughfare between Fort Richardson and Chugach State Park, which both have large bear populations. However, he said it is extremely unusual for them to prey on dogs, especially one tethered to a house.

"They walk past thousands of dogs. They are walking through and by people's backyards all the time. If they wanted to eat dogs, they could fill up on dogs every day. They wouldn't have to be tied up. Just about any dog could be pulled down by a bear," Sinnott said. "It's pretty unusual. Bears, for the most part, are after the easy stuff like garbage and birdseed. They'll even go into chicken coops, eat the chicken food and leave the chickens alone."

He said while Casper's being eaten is tragic, it doesn't necessarily mean the bear that ate him is dangerous or going to do it again.

"One time I wouldn't call it a threat. If we see a pattern, if it does it again and we think it's the same bear, then obviously that's definitely a whole different situation. It might have killed it just because it was yapping at it," Sinnott said, adding that there have not been any additional reports of area bears attacking dogs.

But that is no reassurance to Johnson, who said she has seen bears become increasingly bolder throughout her years in the area.

"It's really scary," she said. "The bears, they've taken over this area. Every year we have at least three bears roaming through the yard."

Sinnott said increased bear activity is in large part due to the changes in hunting laws that have occurred over the years.

"People were shooting bears just as a matter of course back in the '40s and '50s and '60s," he said. "Hunting has been closed down throughout pretty much all the Anchorage Bowl and the Lower Eagle River Valley. We've had several generations of bears that have grown up without being hunted.

"You don't necessarily have to shoot at an animal and miss it to teach it that guns are dangerous. All you have to do is shoot the bears that are very bold or very stupid and the other bears are just the naturally wary bears," Sinnott added. "So if you don't shoot the bold bears and you don't shoot the stupid bears, the ones that take the chances come into town and find out we have all this great garbage and birdseed and stuff here and start getting into trouble."

He said it's the human's responsibility to be the more responsible one by keeping bear attractants such as birdseed, garbage and dog food secure from April through October when bears are most active.

Fletcher said her family has always taken such steps, but it hasn't prevented bears from passing close to her home or climbing onto her car in the middle of night. As a result, she said her younger two children are frightened to go out and play in their yard or commit to a new family dog.

"We're kind of in a situation where this house was built, the yard was landscaped for the kids and we can't really use it for that with the bears," Fletcher said. "It was upsetting to lose a pet, but to me, the hardest part was that my kids had to watch that. How do you explain that?"

She said the one small relief she has is that she doesn't think Casper suffered.

"Ripping him from the leash and stuff, I think it must have been pretty quick," Fletcher said.

Reach the reporter at mary.rall@alaskastar.com.

This article published in The Alaska Star on Thursday, September 28, 2006.