Bear Stories - a Report from the Front Line
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Last week my neighbour, a retired hockey player, ran through our yard chasing a bear with a hockey stick. He pounded on our back door on the way by and my husband saw him and the bear disappear down our back garden. This bear has rattled my neighbour's ground-level glass sliding door and also sat in her chestnut tree eating branches while watching her kids play in the pool.
My Persian friend says her friends had a bear family encamped in the carport and the "authorities" told her it is the bear's territory.
The municipality has printed pamphlets, with taxpayer's money I presume, telling us to stay indoors and avoid the bears, or some other nonsense.
I have a book at my summer cottage documenting bear attacks which would scare any sane person. The problem has been big there, too.
My daughter has made the only logical suggestion I have heard (short of dispatching them to bear heaven, for which, by the way, one can serve jail time), which is to put bear feeding stations high up in the mountains, the obvious cause of this problem being lack of food in their own habitat.
In the meantime, something serious could happen, God forbid. Maybe a huge lawsuit against our erstwhile "protectors" would shake things up.
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Our plague here is BEARS. Coming down from the mountains looking for food. It is not politically correct any more for police or wildlife officers to shoot them . We are supposed to yell at them and make them feel unwelcome. When we do so they just amble off, bumping down fences, climbing apple trees, upsetting garbage cans, going after dirty diapers.
I called the bear people and they told me to scare them off so my husband got out his army bugle and gave it a blast, but the bear just looked at him.
When I told them the bear was up the fruit tree, they told me to pick the fruit. When I said the fruit was too high to pick, they told me to hire a fruit picker!
People are afraid to walk their dogs, the older ones can’t go for walk, and mothers won’t let kids play outside.
With one bear being lethally dispatched two days ago at Ridgeway School, for invading a not-bear-proof dumpster, surrounded by watching and later horrified students; with the local press reporting a cornered citizen swinging his child’s stroller (the only convenient weapon) at an approaching bear in his car porch; with more and more sightings here and there – even down on that waterfront street next to the $18 million home bought by either Oprah or a gold mining tycoon -- the story keeps changing – one might say things are getting out of hand,
And finally, this late breaking news from the North Shore News (October 4, 2004),
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A North Vancouver resident walk(ed) into his kitchen to find a bear cub on his counter eating a blackberry pie. … The …homeowner walked through his front door and into the kitchen area where he was shocked to find a small black bear … situated on top of the kitchen counter helping himself to a blackberry pie. The bear continued to feast on the pie and a bowl of fruit despite the home owners attempts to scare him off by yelling …Conservation officers have been advised …Police want to remind the public to keep your doors shut at all times.
PS Yesterday, a black bear cub was apprehended in our local Safeway supermarket, just off the Westview Interchange. Newspaper accounts did not say what aisle the cub was perusing, but my bet is honey. But good news: grizzlies are staying away. Another newspaper reports that south of Calgary, the victim of a grizzly bear attack is struggling in Foothills Hospital (the grizzly bear will not be destroyed because she was protecting her cubs).
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