Surveillance video from a Colorado pizzeria captured a female bear and her two cubs breaking into the restaurant and raiding the shop’s refrigerator.
According to the owner of Antonio’s Real New York Pizza, the bears “ripped a window out of the wall” at the building’s drive-thru and climbed in.
READ MORE: Death of Bear 148 mourned at Canmore rally, change in behaviours urged
Video recorded the bears wandering through the kitchen, knocking over containers and eating large pieces of salami.
At one point, the bears are even seen pulling an entire baking sheet of uncooked dough from the refrigerator.
The owner of the Estes Park, Colo., restaurant took to Facebook to blame the intrusion on changes made to dumpsters and garbage bins in the town, which straddles the border of Rocky Mountain National Park.
“A note to police for the future: if bears break into our stores, please don’t shoot them.”
“Every dumpster in town is now bear proof which leaves only our homes, cars and businesses,” owner Anthony DeSousa posted online. “While I don’t advocate feeding wildlife in any way, I believe it would have been much better to have left the old dumpster tops in place because they wouldn’t become desperate enough to break into houses or businesses and the damage in dollars would be much lower.”
READ MORE: Grizzly bear survives being hit by car travelling 100 km/h near Canmore
Changes to the town ordinance also required “bird feeders to be suspended on a cable or other device to make them inaccessible to bears when they are active, between April 1 and Dec. 1 of each year.”
DeSousa hopes politicians, police and conservationists could find a suitable solution to keep both the public and wildlife safe.
“We have to come up with a better set of deterrents than creating rules which ensure their euthanization based on the need to eat,” he said. “It’s like we are playing chess with the bear but he doesn’t realize it’s life or death chess.”
Comments