Dan Flasch probably never anticipated having to fight a bear on his own front porch, but when an extremely bold black bear showed up at his home in Mission, BC, he found he had ample motivation to do so: protecting his girlfriend.
The bear attacked the woman when she opened the front door to let her dogs out. “I’ve never heard a woman scream that way in my life, ever,” Flasch told CTV News. He quickly ran to the porch, and found himself unable to see his girlfriend behind the looming figure of the bear.
“The bear had her front paws literally on the front step, just taking up the whole doorway.”
Flasch didn’t have anything at hand to use as a weapon, and a thought flashed through his mind: “Just punch him in the nose. What else am I going to do?”
The animal retreated after being punched, and Flasch chased it away. Then he helped his girlfriend — who had been knocked down by the bear, scratched, and bitten in the back — into their home.
A neighbour, Glenn Wells, saw the bear and her cubs in his yard and attempted, unsuccessfully, to scare them with bear bangers. “I threw [the bear banger] at [the bear], and it blew up and [the bears] just sat there. They didn’t care.”
Conservation officers later found the bear and her two cubs, and the bear bit an officer in the leg, a wound which needed stitches. The bears were euthanized, though they were the first to be killed in Mission this year, out of 245 calls about bears.
Having to fight off a bear left Flasch shaken, but on the plus side, it did give him an opportunity to confirm his feelings for his girlfriend. “I’ll put myself in the way of danger any day for her,” he said. “I love her very much.”
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