Anyone who’s heard the story of Goldilocks and the three bears knows that it’s a bad idea to break into a bear’s house. But what about when bears break into your house? That’s exactly what happened to a family in Rossland, B.C., recently, and unfortunately, the story doesn’t have a fairytale ending.
The Warwick family was at home when they found a bear cub going through garbage in their basement. Alarmed, they scared the cub out and closed all the doors, but the bear returned with a sibling in tow. One of the bears got up on its hind legs and looked into the home’s kitchen.
“It was on my back deck with its paws up against the door to my kitchen, looking through the window into my house,” Miche Warwick told the CBC. Warwick tried to scare the bear away by banging on the window and yelling, but it was undeterred. The bears then went to the home’s basement window, where one of them broke the glass with his nose, and both bears entered the home.
“I had three kids upstairs on the main floor and two bears in the basement,” said Warwick. “It was utterly terrifying.”
The window where the bear broke into the Warwickes’ home.
However, Warwick’s own animal instincts soon kicked in. “At some point in this whole situation, something switched in my head and I became the mother bear protecting her cubs,” she said. She called emergency services, and conservation officers came to remove the bears, who had to be euthanized.
Ben Beetlestone, one of the officers, noted that most bears will stay away from homes and basements where food is secured, but these bears had an extreme lack of fear, which is why they had to be put down. “We can’t have bears entering into houses,” Beetlestone said. “It’s just too much of a risk to the public.”
