Conservation officers have killed a sow and cub believed responsible for trashing a car Sunday night, Nov. 1, in the King and Chaster Road area of Elphinstone.
Resident Kim Reib said she learned her car had been damaged when a neighbour knocked at her door Monday morning, Nov. 2 and told her nine- and 13-year-old stepchildren that Reib's car door was open and its contents were spilling out.
"The kids came upstairs and said 'Um, the bear got in your car,'" Reib recounts. "And then all I knew was, 'Oh, I have no car left.' That's the only thing that came to mind, because I knew the last incident was a trashing."
The last incident Reib spoke of, confirmed by conservation officer Dean Miller, involved a nearby neighbour. In that situation, which Miller said occurred a few months ago, a bear entered a neighbour's car, and the door fell shut behind it. The bear then proceeded to trash the vehicle, which was deemed a write-off for insurance purposes.
Nor was that the only bear incident in the area. Miller said that since June, conservation has received 26 reports of bears having conflict with humans in the area - many of them related to a sow and cub pair.
When Reib went outside to investigate the damage, her hunch proved correct.
"The bear had gotten its claws into the back of the back seat and pulled the back seat right off," she said, noting that the car was also wet and smelly and contained paw prints. "And whatever was in my trunk - which was basically antifreeze, oil, all that kind of stuff - it had pulled everything out from the trunk."
After leaving a message with conservation, making a trip to Sechelt's RCMP detachment and stopping by to discuss the situation with an Insurance Corporation of British Columbia representative, Reib came home.
And saw a bear.
She laid on the horn, scaring the bear up a big cedar tree, and called 9-1-1.
"I said, 'I have a bear up a tree, it just trashed my car, I'm not letting this bear come down until something's done'," she recounted.
When conservation arrived on scene, approximately half an hour later, officers made a decision to kill the bear up the tree -a cub - and its mother, who arrived on scene not long after. They shot both bears.
"They were human-habituated, food-conditioned bears," Miller said, adding that conservation tries to give sow and cub groups reasonable latitude and address attractant management issues first, before making the decision to destroy the animals.
Of late, though, he said, the actions of the sow and cub have escalated. On Halloween, the sow - that was injured, limiting her ability to forage for food naturally - crawled across the field at Cedar Grove Elementary School while kids were playing soccer.
Miller said nothing in the car was a bear attractant; however, the bears had learned to associate vehicles with "food rewards."
Reib said she's distressed, both because her car may be deemed a write-off and she'll have trouble replacing it with the insurance payout, and because she was sad to see the bears killed.
"I bawled my eyes out," she said. "It's not something I wanted to see done, but I have kids."
