Super-Strong Grizzly Flipped 800-Pound Dumpsters Before Being Put Down

Park officials had to kill a 400-pound grizzly bear at Yellowstone National Park after it kept looking for human food in different parts of the park.

The 11-year-old male bear was trapped and killed on May 14. Between April 3 and May 13, the bear tried to get human food in several park areas, including Old Faithful and the Nez Perce Picnic Area. The smart animal even figured out how to flip over heavy dumpsters, as the National Park Service writes in their press release.

800-pound dumpsters
“In addition to developing a strategy to flip over 800-pound dumpsters, the bear also uprooted smaller bear-resistant trash cans from their concrete bases to gain access to human food and garbage”, the statement explained. “As a result, the bear became increasingly food-conditioned and posed a risk to public safety in one of the busiest areas of the park. The decision to kill the bear was made to ensure public safety and reduce the chances of other bears becoming habituated to human food.”

Yellowstone’s experts were sad about the need to kill the bear. “It’s unfortunate that this bear began regularly seeking out garbage and was able to defeat the park’s bear-resistant infrastructure”, Yellowstone Bear Management Biologist Kerry Gunther remarked in the release.

Conditioned to human food
“We go to great lengths to protect bears and prevent them from becoming conditioned to human food,” she added. “But occasionally, a bear outsmarts us or overcomes our defenses. When that happens, we sometimes have to remove the bear from the population to protect visitors and property.”

This is the first bear that has been put down at Yellowstone since 2017. The last time this happened was also because a bear posed danger to visitors by trying to get food from campsites.