Bear runs amok on US campsite
A bear rampaged through an American campsite killing one man and injuring two other people in the middle of the night.
A woman who survived the attack in Yellowstone National Park said she was bitten on her arm and leg before she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone.
Wildlife rangers tonight said they had captured the mother grizzly responsible for the attack along with two of her three cubs.
The bear was lured into a trap fashioned from culvert pipe.
Warden Sam Sheppard said he was confident they had captured the killer bear because it came back to the same site where the man was killed.
He described the rampage as a highly unusual predatory attack.
“She basically targeted the three people and went after them,” he said.
Officials have said the bear will be killed. State and federal wildlife officials will determine the fate of the cubs. Mr Sheppard said they were unlikely to be returned to the wild because they could have been learning predatory behaviour from their mother.
The bear attack was the worst in the Yellowstone area since the 1980s, wildlife officials said.
In 2008 at the same campground, a grizzly bear bit a man sleeping in a tent. A young adult female grizzly was captured in a trap four days later.
The region has hundreds of signs warning visitors to keep food out of the bears’ reach. Experts say that bears who eat human food quickly become used to people, increasing the danger of an attack.
Yet in the case of the Soda Butte Campground attack, all the victims had put their food into metal food canisters installed at campsite, said Fish, Wildlife and Parks Warden Sam Sheppard.
“They were doing things right,” he said. “It was random. I have no idea why this bear picked these three tents out of all the tents there.”
