Bear shot by London police has a 1 in 3 chance of surviving
CBC News | Posted: June 15, 2020 8:15 PM | Last Updated: June 15, 2020
An animal rescue organization says the bear has bullet fragments lodged on one of its legs
A wayward bear that wandered into a Byron backyard now has a one in three chance of survival after a wound from a police bullet became infected, according to the animal rescue organization nursing it back to health.
The black bear was the centre of a 14-hour standoff with police and wildlife officials after it climbed a tree behind a townhouse condominium complex in Byron earlier this month. The animal was at first shot by London police, sending it further up the tree. It was then tranquilized five times by provincial wildlife officials before it came down.
The animal was then loaded into a trailer and sent to the Huntsville area where it is currently in the care of Bear With Us, a non-profit organization that takes injured and orphaned bears and returns them to the wild.
Mike McIntosh, the founder of Bear With Us, told CBC News the three-year-old male black bear's health quickly deteriorated after he arrived because of an infection from a wound caused by the police bullet.
London bear's chances of survival are 1 in 3
"Two days ago his chances of survival were very, very slim because of infection from the bullet wound," McIntosh said Monday.
The bear is being seen by a wildlife veterinarian, who told McIntosh that while the bear's health is showing signs of improvement, his chances of survival are still only one in three.
"The bullet fragments had shattered when they went through the rear end of his body and some of the fragments went through his muscle right down to his knee. With that of course, it makes a track in the flesh and infection follows and that's why it's so serious because the infection was widespread."
"The infection is getting more and more under control, so today it's probably a 30 per cent chance that he'll survive, which is much improved."
Police opened fire on the bear after he started to climb down the tree. At that point, provincial wildlife officials had yet to arrive on scene and a crowd of dozens of curious onlookers had gathered to steal a glimpse of an animal that rarely appears in an urban setting this far south.
'The animal is not really a threat to people'
McIntosh said he was reticent to specifically comment on the police decision to shoot the animal, but that he would offer his general opinion on similar situations of when large predator animals emerge from the forest and into the urban jungle.
"I wasn't there," McIntosh said. "In general, most police officers don't really understand what a bear's intentions are and especially in the City of London, they don't see many bears in the city."
"The animal is not really a threat to people but people are hard to manage when it comes to crowds and crowds make bears nervous and that's why it tried to come out of the tree, which is why the officers shot at it, to try to keep it up the tree."
The black bear likely wandered into the city by following forest tracks along rivers and waterways, McIntosh said. While its rare for a sighting in London, it does happen from time to time in a number of southern Ontario cities, including Newmarket, Toronto and even Hamilton.
"We deal with this every year and it's more the time of the year than anything else," he said. "specifically June, people have bird seed out or whatever and it attracts them in wherever those bird feeders are located."
McIntosh said there likely aren't a lot of black bears in southwestern Ontario because of the vast tracts of open farmland that dominate the area, but he said there are probably more than we realize.
"Young bears like this one, they do a lot of roaming. A few hundred kilometres is no big deal to a young bear," he said.
McIntosh said if the bear survives, he'll be released back into the wild in an area determined by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry once he's healthy enough to fend for himself.
"He won't be coming back to London," he said.