AR-News: (CA) Bear raids home for food...caught red-pawed...

[Barry Kent MacKay]

lettertoed at thestar.ca

Jun. 10, 2004. 06:23 AM

Teen walks in on home 'bearglary'
Animal uses paw to unlock door
Eats sandwich, fish food, ketchup


ROBERTA AVERY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

HUNTSVILLE-A 13-year-old boy escaped unharmed after walking in on what 
police are calling a "bearglary" at his home near here.

"The intruder was a large black bear. He gained entry by opening a sliding 
screen door and helped himself to a sandwich, he was standing in the living 
room when the boy walked in on him," said Constable Harry Rawluk of the 
Huntsville detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police.

The boy ran out of the house in Port Sydney, about 15 minutes south of 
Huntsville, and flagged a motorist on nearby Highway 11 who called 911.

The bear fled at the sound of police sirens, Rawluk said.

"I've heard bears are pretty smart, but this one was really sharp," said 
Sherry Walsh of her son Brett's close encounter on Tuesday night. "He 
punched a hole in the screen mesh and put his paw through and unlocked the 
catch and then slid open the door."

The animal, drawn, Walsh suspects, by a pot of bacon grease she had left on 
the stove, also helped itself to some ketchup and a package of goldfish 
food.

"It was kind of freaky," Brett Walsh said, describing the bear "on all four 
legs like a great big dog."

The bear vandalized the home, wrecking the kitchen stove by tossing it to 
one side, and trashed all the living room plants.

"I've heard that once bears find food they keep coming back and that's 
pretty scary," Walsh said.

Recent sightings of black bears in the Town of Georgina have prompted York 
Region police to advise area residents to keep an eye on their trash cans. 
Since Sunday afternoon, seven bear sightings have been reported. One 
approached a little girl in the backyard of her home on Catering Rd. before 
being scared off by an adult.

While bear encounters are unusual in Muskoka, they are more common in the 
Sudbury area where officers have been called to more than 400 occurrences 
since the end of March when the natural resources ministry introduced a bear

hotline. As of last Sunday, 3,838 calls have come in from across the 
province to the BearWise toll-free line; of those nearly 2,000 required a 
call out from an officer, said ministry spokesperson Jolanta Kowalski.

"Ministry staff found that in over 80 per cent of nuisance bear problems, a 
non-natural food source was responsible for attracting the bears and in 50 
per cent of those cases it was domestic garbage," Kowalski said.

Tory MPP Bill Murdoch (Bruce-Grey Owen Sound) who opposed his own 
government's decision under then-premier Mike Harris to cancel the spring 
hunt said he's not surprised to hear the ministry has already had to respond

to nearly 2,000 bear calls a little more than nine weeks into the program.

"The bear population is going to continue to grow, so it's a situation 
that's only going to get worse," Murdoch said. "I'm not advocating going 
back to the spring hunt as it was, but something like a cull hunt to reduce 
the bear population has to be done before somebody gets killed."

Rough estimates indicate that 75,000 to 100,000 bears live in Ontario but 
ministry experts have long maintained that the increase in bear sightings is

a trend that began long before the cancellation of the spring bear hunt and 
attribute it to people encroaching on bear territory and not the other way 
around.

Rawluk warned cottage owners that grills can act as bear bait. "If a 
barbecue isn't cleaned off, the smell will attract bears from miles around."


With files from Emily Mathieu



________________

Barry Kent MacKay
Canadian Representative 
ANIMAL PROTECTION INSTITUTE 
www.api4animals.org