Thursday, February 23, 2012

The War On Nuisance Bears

This is from my local newspaper. The article isn’t posted on their website so I can’t provide a link, sorry. This is what happens when forest rangers suffer from cop envy:
NDOW [Nevada Department of Wildlife] operates on a three-strike rule with department tagged “nuisance bears.” Once a nuisance bear is caught violating the department’s policy (property damage and getting into uncontained trash are two of the more common violations), it is killed. Other less-severe instances, even if a bear is scared up a tree and eventually tranquilized by NDOW, can also result in a bruin earning a strike.
Yeah, that’ll teach ‘em.

1 comment:

BadTux said...

Nuisance bears aren't like, say, squirrels or raccoons. Once they've gotten a taste for people food they can be deadly, because they are capable of tearing the doors off cars to obtain the morsels of people food goodness inside. And oh, the people in the car, well. They get shredded too while the bear is trying to get at that picnic basket in the trunk that he can smell (the usual route is to rip off the back door, then rip out the back seat, to get to the food).

Reminds me of a dumb redneck I read about in the Bakersfield (CA, Okie-ville) newspaper who encountered such a bear. Said dumb redneck started waving a .45 automatic pistol around and yelling at the bear who was raiding his picnic basket. The bear got annoyed and ripped the pistol out of the redneck's hands before the redneck could even start thinking about pulling the trigger, tearing open the guy's arm from elbow to wrist in the process, and only the fact that the gun went off as the bear flung it away resulted in a still-living redneck at the end of the day (the noise scared off the bear). Point being, a bear weighs in at around 800 pounds of pure muscle, and is *not* a cuddly animal. They are dangerous predators, and far too abundant at present due to the fact that bear hunting is no longer a popular sport and their natural predators (wolves) no longer exist in most of the nation.

- Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin(*)
(Who has had his motorcycle mauled by a black bear seeking the source of that fishy smell emanating from the WD-40 on the chain -- thankfully while I wasn't on it).