Matt Errico came out of the bathroom in Granby, Colorado, and found two young bears standing in his hallway. Nobody moved. Then the bears turned and walked out the front door.

The bears are in the towns of the American West this year: a vape shop in Granby, a school in Santa Fe, a farmers market in Denver. The driest winter on record wiped out the grasses, berries and nuts that make up about 90 percent of what a bear eats. Colorado has logged more than 7,000 sightings, more than in any year before, and Utah has already put down 39 bears.

Carry one back up the mountain and it comes down again, because the mountain is still empty. So people say the kind thing: if there is no food up there, feed them.

Here is the catch. A bear cannot decide 「the food is short this year, so we will raise fewer cubs」 the way a farmer plans a harvest. An animal lives where it can live and breeds when it can breed. Feed them, and more of them get through the winter. More get through, and more of them breed. Then there are more bears on a mountain that already had nothing.

And each one has learned where the easy food comes from. Feeding is not the kindness that ends this. It is the kindness that grows it, and hands the bill to somebody years from now, in a hallway, in a shop, somewhere nobody wanted to meet a bear.