Yellowstone Park's Superintendent says many of the calls coming in from the public following the killing of a hiker by a grizzly bear this week are from folks concerned the bear not be given an automatic death sentence.

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Yellowstone Park Superintendent, Dan Wenk, says they have no reason to believe the bear involved is a killer.

"We do not believe that this defensive action by the bear would make a future action any more probable."

Wildlife biologist, Kerry Gunther, says the defensive nature of the attack leads them to believe they won't need to track and capture the mother who was with her young cubs when Brian and Marilyn Matayoshi  encountered her about a mile down a trail in the vicinity of Canyon Village Wednesday morning. Brian Matayoshi was killed after he and his wife turned to run from the charging animal.

"We have no plans to trap and capture the bear. We are monitoring the bear from the air to keep an eye on where the bear is. We have collected some hair from the scene as well as some scat and we will do DNA analysis and get a DNA fingerprint so that if we had another incident we would be able to determine if it's this bear or not."

Superintendent Wenk says they'll set up a board of inquiry to make sure they haven't missed anything in their investigations.

Deputy Chief Ranger, Nick Herring, says they'll continue to monitor the mother and the cubs, "where they are and their movements.  And then basically we'll pull together a team of park staff who are very skilled at evaluating these kinds of situations and we'll talk about our options and come to a consensus on what we think the best course of action would be."

This Sunday on Report To Wyoming you can hear extended excerpts from this press conference. That's this Sunday at 7am on all of our Townsquaremedia stations and again Sunday evening at 9pm on k2 radio a.m. 1030

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