On July 19, 2026, Washington hikers Brook and Kraig Koski were on the Taylor Lake trail in Banff National Park when their small dog, Lola, spotted Bear 142 — a well-known, tagged 16-year-old female grizzly — and did what off-leash dogs do near wildlife. She ran at the bear, barking. Then she ran back. Then she did it again, for roughly 90 seconds, while the bear followed the couple down the trail and one of them yelled “Back off!”

They had bear spray. Visible in the video, in hand. What they didn’t have was a leash on their dog, and that’s the detail that’s turned a scary trail moment into a legal one. Parks Canada has laid regulatory charges against the Koskis, and they’re facing a fine of up to $25,000 CAD.

This isn’t a story about a mauling. Nobody got hurt. Bear 142 never turned aggressive. That’s actually what makes it useful — it’s a clean, low-drama example of exactly the rule this site (and every national park) hammers on, with a real dollar figure attached instead of an abstract warning.

Quick Verdict: What Happened and What It Means

Detail	What You Need to Know
Date of incident	July 19, 2026, Taylor Lake trail, Banff National Park
Who	Brook and Kraig Koski, Washington State, and their dog Lola
The bear	Bear 142, a well-known, tagged 16-year-old female grizzly
The video	Posted to TikTok July 21, 2026; several million views since
The charge	Regulatory charge under the Canada National Parks Act
The specific rule	Section 5, National Parks of Canada Domestic Animal Regulations — leash must not exceed 3 metres
Maximum fine	$25,000 CAD
Injuries	None reported
Backing research	April 2026 Journal of Wildlife Management study found unleashed dogs are involved in bear conflicts nearly 6x as often as leashed dogs

Bottom line: The leash law in bear country isn’t a suggestion, and it isn’t really about your dog’s behavior on a normal day. It’s about the one day a bear is on the other side of the bend.

What Actually Happened on the Taylor Lake Trail

Taylor Lake sits roughly nine miles southeast of Lake Louise, a moderate trail that a lot of visiting hikers treat as a warm-up hike. The Koskis were on it with Lola, a small dog, off-leash, when Bear 142 appeared on the trail ahead of them.

Bear 142 isn’t a random grizzly. She’s a known, collared breeding female in the Banff bear population — the kind of individual park biologists track by name and history, not just species. She’d already had a hard year: she lost a cub to a train strike earlier in 2026, which is its own reminder of how much risk moves through that valley even without dogs involved.

In the video, Lola runs at the bear repeatedly, barking, then retreats to the hikers, then charges again. The bear follows. One of the Koskis can be heard yelling “Back off!” Bear spray is visible in someone’s hand throughout — but it never gets deployed, and the dog never gets leashed or picked up. The encounter runs about 90 seconds before it ends without contact.

Posted to TikTok on July 21, the clip picked up several million views within days. That’s the part that turned a fairly common backcountry mistake into an example. Most off-leash dog-bear encounters in bear country don’t get filmed, don’t go viral, and don’t result in charges. This one checked all three boxes.

The Charge: Section 5 and the 3-Meter Rule

Parks Canada laid regulatory charges against the Koskis under the Canada National Parks Act. The specific rule is Section 5 of the National Parks of Canada Domestic Animal Regulations, which requires that a pet be restrained on a leash no longer than 3 metres — about 10 feet — at all times inside a national park. Not “under voice control.” Not “usually stays close.” On a leash, physically attached, full stop.

Parks Canada’s own guidance for Banff states it plainly: dogs must be on leash at all times, and it’s the law, not a courtesy request. The maximum penalty for a violation under the Act is $25,000 — which sounds enormous for a leash law until you consider what the leash law is actually preventing.

This is a different animal, so to speak, than the fines we’ve covered in our breakdown of 2026 national park dog rules, where a Golden Gate NRA off-leash violation runs $275. Canada’s national parks treat wildlife-adjacent leash violations as a much bigger deal, and the Koski case shows why that gap exists — a $275 fine doesn’t reflect what’s actually at stake when a dog provokes a grizzly.

WildSmart program director Nick de Ruyter put it about as bluntly as you can: there was plenty of time in that 90-second video to grab the dog and clip on a leash. Nobody did.

Why an Off-Leash Dog Makes a Bear Encounter Worse, Not Better

There’s a common assumption that a dog adds a layer of protection in bear country — extra eyes, extra warning, maybe even a deterrent. A study published in April 2026 in the Journal of Wildlife Management, “The Canine Conundrum: Is a Dog a Help or Hindrance in Bear Country?”, tested that assumption against more than a century of data and came back with a fairly hard no.

How Much More Dangerous Are Unleashed Dogs in Bear Country?

Researchers, led by Tom Smith at Brigham Young University, reviewed 326 documented dog-bear conflicts across North America spanning 1901 to 2023. The pattern held across more than a hundred years of incidents:

1. Unleashed dogs were involved in bear conflicts nearly six times as often as leashed dogs.
2. Dogs provoked the bear in 54% of conflicts — meaning the dog’s behavior, not the bear’s, triggered the escalation more often than not.
3. Dogs gave their owners advance warning of the bear in only about 9% of cases — the “early warning system” idea mostly doesn’t hold up.
4. Dogs failed to come to their owner’s aid in 40% of attacks, often fleeing or hiding instead.
5. A dog’s presence roughly doubled the odds of a bear conflict compared to same-sized groups hiking without one.

The human and animal cost in that dataset: 166 people injured, five killed, and 56 dogs killed by bears — 44 of them off-leash at the time. Co-author Lana Ciarniello’s read on the mechanism lines up with what the Taylor Lake video shows: dogs often don’t defend their owners so much as run for cover behind them, dragging an agitated bear along for the trip.

None of that means dogs are useless in the backcountry, or that you should leave yours home. It means the specific behavior in that Taylor Lake video — an off-leash dog running at a grizzly and back, repeatedly — is close to the textbook setup for exactly the outcome the study measured. Lola happened to disengage before it went further. That’s luck, not a training result.

We wrote about this same dynamic in more general terms in our guide to wildlife encounters on the trail: a dog that chases or barks at a bear can agitate an animal that might otherwise have ignored you entirely, then bring it back toward you at a dead run. The Koski video is that scenario, filmed, with a bear that happened to have more patience than the situation deserved.

What the Leash Law Is Actually Protecting

It’s easy to read “3-meter leash requirement” as bureaucratic box-checking. It isn’t. The leash is the mechanism that removes the decision from your dog’s instincts and keeps it with you — which matters most in the exact moment your dog can’t be trusted to make it, because a fast-moving predator just entered the picture.

A leashed dog can’t close the 40 feet between the trail and a grizzly. It can’t circle behind the bear. It can’t drag a startled 300-pound animal back toward the humans it was mildly curious about a second ago. All of those are things an off-leash dog can do, and none of them require a poorly trained dog — Lola wasn’t acting out of character for a dog. She was acting exactly like a dog, which is the entire point of the rule.

We cover this from the training side in our piece on teaching a dog off-leash reliability: even a dog with genuinely excellent recall doesn’t get tested against a live grizzly during training sessions. Recall built around chipmunks and other hikers is a different skill than recall against prey drive triggered by an actual predator. Bear country is one of the clearest cases where “my dog is well-behaved” and “my dog should be off-leash here” are separate questions with separate answers.

If your dog’s leash manners on technical or wildlife-heavy trail need work before your next bear-country trip, our trail-specific leash skills guide covers the difference between sidewalk-leash and backcountry-leash competence — a gap that catches a lot of otherwise well-trained dogs off guard.

What This Means If You’re Planning a Bear Country Trip

The Koski case is Banff-specific in its numbers, but the underlying rule isn’t unique to Canada. U.S. national parks with grizzly populations — Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Glacier — carry their own strict leash and dog-access rules, some stricter than a leash requirement; Glacier bans dogs from trails entirely, and Yellowstone restricts them to within 100 feet of roads and campgrounds. We break down the current rules park by park in our 2026 national park dog rules guide, and if you’re hiking anywhere with an active grizzly population this season, it’s worth a check before you go — our spring grizzly safety rundown covers what to actually do if you see a bear with your dog on trail.

Practical takeaways from this one:

• Leash means leash, not “usually leashed.” A 3-meter maximum in Canadian national parks; check the specific limit for U.S. parks, which varies.
• Bear spray in your hand doesn’t substitute for a leashed dog. The Koskis had spray ready and never needed it, largely because the bear stayed calm — a hikers’-luck outcome, not a strategy.
• “My dog will come back to me” isn’t the relevant question in bear country. Whether your dog approaches the bear in the first place is the thing a leash controls; recall is a backup plan you shouldn’t need.
• A viral clip doesn’t need a mauling to matter. The Koskis are facing a five-figure fine for a video where nothing physically went wrong. Consequences don’t require an injury.

The Bottom Line

Nobody got hurt on the Taylor Lake trail, and Bear 142 — a grizzly who’d already had a rough year — walked away from the encounter without incident. That’s the good outcome buried in a video that’s otherwise a case study in what not to do. An off-leash dog, a known grizzly, 90 seconds of chase-and-retreat, and now a couple facing a fine that can run as high as $25,000 for a decision that would have cost them nothing to avoid: clip on a leash before the trail, not after the bear shows up.

The research backs up what the video shows on its own — a dog off-leash near a bear is a liability more often than an asset, by a wide margin. If you’re headed into bear country with your dog this season, the leash isn’t the inconvenient rule. It’s the cheap insurance.

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Incident and charge details sourced from CBC News, Global News, and Outdoor Life. Leash regulation text from the National Parks of Canada Domestic Animal Regulations and Parks Canada. Research findings from Smith et al., “The Canine Conundrum: Is a Dog a Help or Hindrance in Bear Country?”, Journal of Wildlife Management, April 2026. This is an active regulatory case; outcomes and penalties can change as it proceeds.