Bob CollinsAlright, let’s figure this out, people. We’ve got a bear in Roseau, Minn., who investigated what was inside a 10-gallon metal milk jug. It turns out nothing was inside until the bear’s head showed up there, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources says on its Facebook page.
Any ideas, people?
First, conservation officer Eric Benjamin and his colleagues drilled holes in the jug so the bear could breathe.
That worked.
They tried the old cooking-oil-on-a-bear’s-head trick.
That didn’t work.
Then they called the Roseau Fire Department.
That worked. That always works.
First they had to put a tarp over the bear and wrestle it to hold still.
The bear didn’t know that Aaron Rose, one of the firefighters, is the wrestling coach in Roseau.
The bear was unimpressed.
“He took one shot at the bear, and he got it tipped over, but the bear kept rolling and just pushed him right off,” Rose’s colleague said.
Two held the bear down, one used the “jaws of life” to cut the jug.
The bear, which took off into the woods, was not happy. But, then again, the bear didn’t know that the next option was “kill the bear.”
“I’m not sure how long it had been on the bear’s head before the farmer noticed it,” Benjamin tells the Grand Forks Herald. “He called me — he had already tried to get it off, because the can was wedged between a tree and a shed — and he had tried to pull on the can to see if it would come loose off the bear’s head, and he was getting nowhere.”
“The bear was not, I would say, at 100 percent by the time I got out there, but it still had more than enough energy to take swipes and push and pull,” Benjamin said. “It was weird. I’ve come across bears before but not one that was stuck in a can.”
