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Retired publishing executive ecstatic with the idea of spending most of his time on the coast of Maine

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Bear Killed in City

This was a prominent headline in Maine today. A black bear gets herself up a tree in suburban Portland, finds herself surrounded by police, starts to act "a little strangely," takes off for the woods nearby, whereupon she's shot by a game warden. Apparently, there was menace to people and traffic (!), and no time to wait for a tranquilizer gun. Even if a tranquilizer gun had been available and the bear returned to the wild, a spokeswoman for the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife said they couldn't risk, since it's now bear season, "having a hunter harvest it and ingest the tranquilizer chemicals." The clearance rate for those chemicals was not given.

Here's an alternate scenario.

"Suburbanite Killed in Country"

A pale accountant goes on a hike, finds himself surrounded by wildlife, starts pointing his cell phone wildly about and crying for help, tries to climb a tree, whereupon he's dragged back and mauled by a moose, a black bear, and two crows. "He was a menace to the kids," said "Bull" Alces, spokesmoose for the community. "That cell phone could have been a gun. Even if it wasn't, he could have been calling hunters. There was no time to return him to the city. We had to eat him."

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