Backyard Snooze Brings Uninvited Guest: A Bear
As I also edit Alaska Sporting Journal, filing posts on bear attacks is commonplace in the Last Frontier. Even in a state that features an ursine creature in its flag, it’s a big deal when there’s a bear incident here in the Golden State. When the offending bruin does it in someone’s backyard it is that much more eye-popping.
Here’s more from CBS Los Angeles (video here):
“She awoke to the sound of an aggressive bear that was approaching her and then commenced an immediate attack on her,” Capt. Patrick Foy, of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, said. “She ended up sustaining scratches to her arms and legs and then, ultimately, the bear bit into her leg.”
Foy said the woman hit the bear with her laptop, and it ran away.
“They didn’t provoke the animal, they didn’t get between the animal and its cubs, they didn’t attract it inadvertently with a strong odor of food,” Foy said. “This person was asleep with a laptop in her lap and was doing nothing that would be argued as inadvertently attracting this bear.”
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune that California Department of Fish and Wildlife officers trapped a sow bear and its cub that were tranquilized – unfortunately the cub later died after having a bad reaction to the injection – but the sow was not the suspected attacking bear and was released into the wilderness. The bruin in question also was connected to a 2019 attack in the same Southern California community (Sierra Madre is indeed in California and not Alaska!). Here’s the SGV Tribune with more:
On April 23, 2019, an 83-year-old man sleeping off of Chantry Flat Road heard a bear, woke up and extended his hand so the animal could smell him.
He suffered scratches to his face and an arm during the attack. The bear followed him when he walked to a Sierra Madre street to get help.
Authorities believe the same bear approached a 19-year-old woman sleeping in a chair on the 2200 block of Santa Anita Avenue on Monday night; it clawed at an arm and a leg, biting a leg.
