Dorje Dundul lately had his foot gnawed via a brown undergo – a member of the species Ursus thibetanus, to be actual.
It wasn’t his first such come across. Recounting the primary of 3 such violent reviews over the last 5 years, Dorje instructed our analysis workforce: “My wife came home one evening and reported that a bear had eaten a lot of corn from the maize field behind our house. So, we decided to shoo it away. While my wife was setting up camp, I went to see how much the bear had eaten. The bear was just sitting there; it attacked me.”
Dorje dropped to the bottom, however the undergo ripped open his blouse and tore at his shoulder. “I started shouting and the bear ran away. My wife came, thinking I was messing with her, but when she saw the wounds, she knew what had happened.”
Researchers Dolma Choekyi Lama, Tsering Tinley and I spoke with Dorje – a 71-year-old resident of Nubri, a Buddhist enclave within the Nepalese highlands – as a part of a three-year find out about of getting old and migration.
Now, you’ll be forgiven for asking what a undergo assault on a septuagenarian has to do with demographic exchange in Nepal. The solution, on the other hand, is the whole thing.
Population of Nubri are at the vanguard of this pattern – and one of the most primary causes is outmigration. Folks, particularly younger other folks, are leaving for training and employment alternatives in other places. It’s depleting family exertions forces, such a lot in order that over 75% of those that had been born within the valley and at the moment are ages 5 to 19 have left and now are living outdoor of Nubri.
It signifies that many older other folks, like Dorje and his spouse, Tsewang, are left by myself of their properties. Two in their daughters are living out of the country and one is within the capital, Kathmandu. Their handiest son runs a trekking hotel in some other village.
Shortage of ‘scarebears’
Till lately, when the corn used to be ripening, folks dispatched younger other folks to the fields to mild bonfires and bang pots all evening to chase away bears. The loss of younger other folks performing as deterrents, along the abandonment of outlying fields, is tempting bears to forage nearer to human flats.
Outmigration in Nubri and equivalent villages is due largely to a loss of instructional and employment alternatives. The issues led to via the elimination of more youthful other folks had been exacerbated via two different elements riding a swiftly getting old inhabitants: Persons are residing longer because of enhancements in well being care and sanitation; and fertility has declined for the reason that early 2000s, from greater than six to lower than 3 births consistent with lady.
Those demographic forces had been accelerating inhabitants getting old for a while, as illustrated via the inhabitants pyramid produced from our 2012 family surveys in Nubri and neighboring Tsum.
Age-Intercourse Composition, Inhabitants of Nubri and Tsum 2012.
Supply: https://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-14-00021.1
A not-so-big marvel, anymore
Nepal isn’t by myself on this phenomenon; equivalent dynamics are at play in other places in Asia. The New York Occasions reported in November 2025 that undergo assaults are on the upward push in Japan, too, in part pushed via demographic traits. Farms there used to function a buffer zone, shielding city citizens from ursine intruders. On the other hand, rural depopulation is permitting bears to encroach on extra densely populated spaces, bringing protection considerations in struggle with conservation efforts.
Dorje can attest to these considerations. After we met him in 2023 he confirmed us deep claw marks working down his shoulder and arm, and he vowed to chorus from chasing away bears at evening.
So in October 2025, Dorje and Tsewang harvested a box earlier than marauding bears may get to it and hauled the corn to their courtyard for safekeeping. The courtyard is surrounded via stone partitions piled prime with firewood – no longer a fail-safe barrier however no less than a deterrent. They coated the corn with a plastic tarp, and for additonal measure Dorje made up our minds to sleep at the veranda.
He described what came about subsequent:
“I woke to a noise that sounded like ‘sharak, sharak.’ I thought it must be a bear rummaging under the plastic. Before I could do anything, the bear came up the stairs. When I shouted, it got frightened, roared and yanked at my mattress. Suddenly my foot was being pulled and I felt pain.”
Dorje suffered deep lacerations to his foot. Skilled in conventional Tibetan drugs, he staunched the bleeding the usage of, paradoxically, a tonic that contained undergo liver.
But his existence used to be nonetheless in peril because of the danger of an infection. It took 3 days and a huge expense via village requirements – identical to more or less US$2,000 – earlier than they may constitution a helicopter to Kathmandu for additional clinical consideration.
And Dorje isn’t the one sufferer. An aged lady from some other village bumped right into a undergo all through a nocturnal tour to her outhouse. It left her with a horrific slash from brow to chin – and her son scrambling to search out finances for her evacuation and remedy.
A girl weeding freshly planted corn around the valley from Trok, Nubri.
Geoff Childs, CC BY-SA
So how must Nepal’s highlanders reply to the rise in undergo assaults?
Dorje defined that previously they set deadly traps when undergo encroachments was too bad. That choice vanished with the introduction of Manaslu Conservation Space Undertaking, or MCAP, within the Nineteen Nineties, a federal initiative to control herbal assets that strictly prohibits the killing of untamed animals.
Studying to smile and undergo it?
Dorje causes that if MCAP quickly at ease the legislation, villagers may band in combination to cull the extra adversarial bears. He knowledgeable us that MCAP officers will pay attention not anything of that choice, but their answers, corresponding to solar-powered electrical fencing, haven’t labored.
Dorje is reflective in regards to the choices he faces as younger other folks depart the village, leaving older folks to combat the bears by myself.
“At first, I felt that we should kill the bear. But the other side of my heart says, perhaps I did bad deeds in my past life, which is why the bear bit me. The bear came to eat corn, not to attack me. Killing it would just be another sinful act, creating a new cycle of cause and effect. So, why get angry about it?”
It continues to be noticed how Nubri’s citizens will reply to the mounting threats bears pose to their lives and livelihoods. However something is apparent: For many who stay in the back of, the outmigration of more youthful citizens is making the perils extra coming near near and the answers more difficult.
Dolma Choekyi Lama and Tsering Tinley made vital contributions to this text. Each are analysis workforce participants at the writer’s venture on inhabitants in an age of migration.
