Dorje Dundul has recently had his legs replaced by a brown bear – a member of the species Ursus thibetanusto be precise.
It was not his first meeting like this. Recounting the first of three such violent experiences in the past five years, Dorje told our research team: “My wife came home one evening and reported that a bear had eaten a lot of corn from the corn field behind our house. So, we decided to put it aside. While my wife was setting up camp, I went to see how much the bear had eaten. The bear had just attack me.”
Dorje fell to the ground, but the bear opened his shirt and cut his shoulder. “I started screaming and the bear ran away. My wife came, she thought I was fighting with her, but when she saw the wounds, she knew what happened.”
Researchers Dolma Choekyi Lama, Tsering Tinley and I spoke to Dorje – a 71-year-old resident of Nubri, a Buddhist enclave in the Nepalese highlands – as part of a three-year study on aging and migration.
Now, you could be forgiven for wondering what a bear attack on a septuagenarian has to do with demographic change in Nepal. The answer, however, is everything.
In recent years, people across Nepal have seen an increase in bear attacks, a phenomenon recorded in news reports and academic studies.
The inhabitants of Nubri are at the forefront of this trend – and one of the main reasons is emigration. People, especially young people, are leaving for education and employment opportunities elsewhere. It is reducing the domestic workforce, so much so that more than 75% of those who were born in the valley and who today are between 5 and 19 years old have left and now live outside of Nubri.
It means that many elderly people, like Dorje and his wife, Tsewang, remain alone in their homes. Two of their daughters live abroad and one is in the capital, Kathmandu. Their only son runs a trekking lodge in another village.
Scarcity of ‘scarebears’
Until recently, when the corn was ripening, the parents would send the young people into the fields to light the fire and water the pots all night to keep the bears away. The lack of young to act as a deterrent, together with the abandonment of distant fields, is enticing the bears to seek closer to human residences.
Emigration to Nubri and similar villages is largely due to a lack of educational and employment opportunities. The problems caused by the removal of younger youth have been compounded by two other factors driving a rapidly aging population: People are living longer because of improvements in health care and sanitation; and fertility has declined since the early 2000s, from more than six to less than three births per woman.
These demographic forces have been accelerating population aging for some time, as shown by the population pyramid constructed from our 2012 household survey in neighboring Nubri and Tsum.
Not such a big surprise, anymore
Nepal is not alone in this phenomenon; similar dynamics are at play elsewhere in Asia. The New York Times reported in November 2025 that bear attacks are on the rise in Japan as well, driven in part by demographic trends. The farms there served as a buffer zone, protecting urban residents from ursine intruders. However, rural depopulation is allowing bears to move into more densely populated areas, bringing safety concerns into conflict with conservation efforts.
Dorje can attest to that concern. When we met him in 2023 he showed us deep claw marks running down his shoulder and arm, and he swore to refrain from chasing bears at night.
So, in October 2025, Dorje and Tsewang harvested a field before the marauding bears could get to it and hauled the corn into their yard for safekeeping. The yard is surrounded by stone walls piled high with firewood – not a damage-proof barrier but at least a deterrent. They covered the corn with a plastic tarp, and for extra measure Dorje decided to sleep on the veranda.
He described what happened next:
“I woke up to a sound that was like ‘sharak, sharak’. I thought it must be a bear burning under the plastic. Before I could do anything, the bear came up the stairs. When I screamed, I was scared, I screamed and pulled on the mattress. Suddenly my leg was being pulled and I felt pain.”
Dorje suffered deep wounds to his leg. Trained in traditional Tibetan medicine, he stopped the bleeding using, ironically, a tonic containing bear liver.
However his life was still in danger due to the risk of infection. It took three days and an enormous expense by village standards – equivalent to roughly US$2,000 – before they could charter a helicopter to Kathmandu for further medical attention.
And Dorje is not the only victim. An old woman from another village collided with a bear during a night excursion in her outhouse. It left her with a horrific slash from forehead to chin – and her son struggling to find funds for her evacuation and treatment.
So how should the hills of Nepal respond to the increase in bear attacks?
Dorje explained that in the past they used to set lethal traps when the bear invasion became too dangerous. That option ended with the creation of the Manaslu Conservation Area Project, or MCAP, in the 1990s, a federal initiative to manage natural resources that strictly prohibits the killing of wildlife.
Learning to laugh and bear it?
Dorje reasons that if the MCAP temporarily relaxed the regulation, the villagers could come together to kill the more hostile bears. He informed us that MCAP officials won’t listen to that option, but their solutions, like solar-powered electric fences, haven’t worked.
Dorje reflects on the choices he faces as the young people leave the village, leaving the older people to fight the bears alone.
“At first, I felt that we should kill the bear. But the other side of my heart says, maybe I did bad deeds in my past life, and that’s why the bear bit me. The bear came to eat corn, not to attack me. Killing would be just another sinful act, which would create a new cycle of cause and effect. So, why am I angry about this?”
It remains to be seen how the residents of Nubri will react to the increasing threats that bears pose to their lives and livelihoods. But one thing is clear: For those left behind, the emigration of younger residents is making the dangers more imminent and the solutions more challenging.
Dolma Choekyi Lama and Tsering Tinley made significant contributions to this article. Both are members of the research team on the author’s project on population in an era of migration.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent not-for-profit news organization that brings you reliable facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Geoff Childs, Washington University in St. Louis
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Geoff Childs receives funding from the National Science Foundation.