Poachers, maybe not. People shooting a mistaken target, more common. If he shot it thinking it was a deer, and not a bear, he wasn’t very close. Guy shoots what he thinks is s dear, realizes it’s a bear, and phones it in as a “self-defense” shooting.
A far more probable scenario. While I was growing up in PA, I remember a couple incidents where some poor farmer would lose a cow that had been mistaken for a deer.