A BEAR ATE MY BEST HUMMINGBIRD FEEDER.
Rude.
Someone tell that bear he's not supposed to eat that with the skin on.
I live in South Africa. And if you live in South Africa and you have any contact with people from the US or Canada you might have run into a question about wildlife like lions and elephants roaming our streets. Most South Africans get pretty offended by questions like this. We are a civilized country, our large and dangerous wildlife gets contained in properly fenced parks.
I use to get offended by this until I visited a few places in Canada and realized that the reason why you ask is that some of your large and dangerous wildlife does simply roam the countryside and sometimes make excursions into town.
This honestly blew my mind. What do you mean, you have bears just walking around? What the hell?
north americans don't all encounter deadly megafauna on our porches and front lawns but it happens often enough that we all think this is a reasonable amount of gigantic animal to happen to your house. so when we think of africa we kinda imagine it like this:
like. if we had elephants here. this is what we would be putting up with on the regular. what do you mean you guys are more sensible than us.
TELL ME AGAIN HOW AUSTRALIA IS THE DEATH COUNTRY We have two spiders and (apparently) 12 snakes but we don’t have lions, bears, wildcats, AND crocodiles. We sometimes have crocodiles and large boas in certain areas. We don’t have to worry about a bear attacking our halloween decor. Or moose deciding to joust on the front lawn. Maybe similar to Africa, America’s fear of Australia is because you all assume our wildlife is exactly as huge and space-invadey.
oh yeah i forgot about the gators
I live halfway between two large cities in a pretty damn suburban area and hearing the sentence “did you hear there was a bear* spotted on [road that is pretty built up and I don’t think of as wild at all]” only left me a little surprised. My mother once saw what she described as a coyote going to school- just walking around a university campus.
so.... yes I was absolutely picturing elephants reaching over your back yard fences for some tasty leaves.
* Ursus americanus for clarification not homosexual sapiens
Couple years ago we had a bear in the market of downtown Ottawa. Ottawa has a population of 1 million, and it made it to the largest market (byward), and had to be removed with sedatives.
yeah, like. the US is big. a lot of it is much wilder than you think.
A few years ago, I called my dad to wish him a happy Father's Day. We caught up for a few minutes about small stuff, and then he said he needed to go fix the door because a bear had gotten into the house and torn the place apart.
Please picture me in a parking lot on a hot June day, one hand pressed against my forehead, as I sighed and said, "Dad, you lead with the bear."
On the one hand, that's finally how I convinced them to move out of the mountains. On the other, there are now a zillion deer in my parents' new yard and my mom wants a few more bears around.
