A brazen black bear followed a two-year-old boy into a house in the Franklin Beach area of Gibsons and it took a punch in the nose to get him to leave – but the bear came back and ultimately had to be destroyed.
Eleri Froude was at home with her two boys, four-year-old Camden and two-year-old Ivany, when the male black bear made his first appearance at about 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 19.
“I was sitting in the living room having a conversation with my friend and he had his back to the sliding door and I was facing him and then I heard Ivany go ‘Mom, look!’. I looked around my friend and the bear was standing fully in my house in the dining room two feet away from my baby,” Froude told Coast Reporter this week.
“I gasped and my friend turned around and he said, ‘Get those kids and get them into the bedroom now,’ and he grabbed Ivany and kind of threw him at me. I grabbed my four-year-old and ran down to the bedroom and slammed the door.”
Froude said her friend, who doesn’t want to be named, picked up a chair and prodded the animal toward the sliding glass door it had followed Ivany through.
“He’s a hunter so he kind of knows about animals and has some experience,” Froude said.
But the bear kept advancing into the house and took a right turn into the kitchen. Froude’s friend followed, trying to get the bear to head back towards the door.
“There’s a second exit out of my kitchen that leads back into the dining room; it’s kind of a loop and the bear went back into the dining room and then started to back out through the sliding door that he had originally come in through,” Froude said.
She explained her friend continued to try to “gently push” the bear out of the house with the chair when it started to advance back into the living room.
“At that point he had been trying to shut the sliding door, hoping that the bear would get uncomfortable with the confined space and pull his head back. It wouldn’t and it was starting to come back in, so he just reached over and punched it on the nose and then slammed the sliding door shut and locked it,” Froude said.
“At that point the bear started clawing at the sliding door trying to get back in and so my friend came down to the bedroom and said I needed to get the kids in the basement in case the bear was able to get back in.”
Froude took her kids to the basement where there was a lockable door. Soon Froude’s friend returned, saying the bear was getting more aggressive and that Froude should call the police and get the kids into the car and leave the area.
“So I got the two kids and put them in the car and started to leave and at that point the police showed up. The police didn’t want to shoot, obviously because all of us just thought it was a one-off situation,” Froude said. “The police tried to scare it off and it went away so the police said, ‘OK, we’re not really going to do anything. The bear’s probably not going to come back.’ And we all thought the same thing, that it would never happen again.”
Froude drove her kids to her friend’s house while he stayed to look around and make sure everything was safe before the single mother returned to her home.
“When he walked around to the front of the house, the bear was back at my house and was now trying to get into the carport door,” Froude said.
“The bear was at the bottom of my driveway, saw my friend standing at the top of the driveway and chased him down Burns Road, down Harmony Lane, into the parking lot for the Harmony Hall Seniors Centre. Then my friend jumped in his truck and called me and said, ‘You need to call the police again. That bear just chased me,’ and it chased him aggressively.”
Froude contacted the police and they came back to the scene, this time with direction from the Conservation Officer Service (COS) to destroy the bear.
“I was up in Powell River at the time. There was no conservation officer to respond so the police handled it well,” said Sgt. Dean Miller of the COS.
“They phoned me for a bit of direction on what to essentially do and I made the determination. This bear and the behaviour, of course, fits into that public safety risk, a high one, so I requested that if they could take a safe shot that they take it and destroy the bear.”
He said the bear needed to be destroyed because it had no real fear of humans and was acting aggressively.
“This puts the term human habituation into capital letters for sure – just a blatant disregard for human presence,” Miller said.
Miller noted the COS hadn’t received any calls of human-bear conflicts in the area recently and said the behaviour of the male bear, which appeared to be healthy and weighed about 220 pounds, was very strange.
“I kind of suspect that this bear developed habits out of possibly being fed by the public,” Miller said. “I mean, what would provoke that kind of behaviour in the first place?”
He noted if someone was feeding the bear, he doesn’t think it was the Froude family, who appeared to be bear aware, keeping garbage locked up in a shed, fruit trees picked and the property clear of bear attractants. Froude wasn’t even cooking anything at the time of the incident.
Miller said the bear may have been the same one that was seen 10 days earlier following someone in the Mahan Trail area, down into Lower Gibsons.
He wonders if there were more incidents involving the same bear that weren’t reported to the COS for fear the animal would be destroyed.
“We want the public to look at us as more of a preventative agency,” Miller said.
“We have the capacity with using tickets and providing public information where we can or using our community partners rather than just looking at us as an agency that just destroys bears. We’re not that single-dimension. There are multiple layers before that choice is made.”
