That was a cub
It sounds silly, but the bear situation is dire in Japan. 235 people had been injured and 13 killed by bears as of December 4. I know people have sympathy for bears. I am one of those people. But with over a dozen human killed and millions of yen in damage to farms, trapping isn’t enough.
It all stems from a poor nut harvest. It turned out the Bear hunt I was on was mostly following around bears with drones and then trapping them. So far 9,800 bears have been captured. I believe this is a record. Think about that. That is nearly 10k bears in human territories. I’m going back to bear trapping tomorrow. The extra scary thing is although early traps worked the bears are learning and they have adapted to avoiding the traps.
We had a bear enter a mall in Noshiro, Akita. Unfortunately this one had to be shot. That is adjacent to the recent areas hit by the recent megathrust Earthquake in Iwate and Aomori.
Below you can see a single bear eating about 90 apples a night, caught on night vision camera, eventually doing about $13,000 dollars in damages to an apple orchard. Many Japanese if they have a guns at all do not have guns large enough to deal with a bear.
You can also see a bear “grocery shopping” inside the store.
