"When these dogs see a bear, it’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They flip a switch,” Carl Lackey, a bear biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, told me.

He was talking about Karelian Bear Dogs, a rare breed of dogs, originally bred in parts of Russia and Finland, that are trained to haze bears and run them from areas where they're not welcome.

I looked into the peculiar world of these bear dogs and the growing number of state agencies that are using them to help alleviate bear-human conflicts in non-lethal ways. You can read the full story on Backpacker.com.