[QuotedForTruth]

Sure, throwing one apple core seems pretty natural. But a national park is full of visitors every day. If it isn't a strict policy not to throw trash and food where animals can scavenge it, they learn to expect and rely on it. This brings them in more frequent contact. With crows that's no big deal, perhaps an annoyance to visitors at worst. But other animals can be much more dangerous. Keeping a healthy fear of people in animals (and honestly of animals in people) is incredibly important.

The most extreme example of this is trash feeding bears in Yellowstone up until 1970. Humans naturally ate at hotels which naturally tossed their trash into giant piles nearby. Bears naturally came looking for all that food they smelled and naturally ate it. The humans then naturally started watching and the park naturally made that easier by putting up grandstands around the trash heaps.

Eventually a new Yellowstone park chief saw the ridiculousness and danger of this and stopped it. It then took a while for the bears to adapt their behavior back to their actual natural behavior without such a rich food source.

http://www.yellowstonepark.com/yellowstone-bears-no-longer-g...