Police know drug users, dealers, and traffickers use elaborate methods of protecting and concealing their illegal goods, but this one is a first in Canada: thirteen black bears, found by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at a marijuana plantation in Christina Lake, British Columbia (near the US-Canada border).

The bears were apparently trained to guard two fields of marijuana plants and fed to become docile and trainable, defending the hidden plantation containing over 2300 plants.  The closest past parallel was police finding a two-meter (six-foot) crocodile at a grow-op in 2003.

Read more at WDIV-DT - ClickOnDetroit.com and The Windsor Star.

An animal rights activist has been convicted under hunting law after interfering with state wildlife biologists, the New Jersey Star-Ledger reports. Susan Kehoe was found guilty after preventing Division of Fish and Wildlife personnel from tranquilizing a black bear to change its radio collar.

Kehoe, who is 60, was also convicted of resisting arrest after refusing to put her hands behind her back. Judges ruled her defense of arm surgery in 1999 unconvincing given her practice of hiking and climbing with recording equipment.

A Pennsylvanian man has been found guilty of illegally killing a 707-pound bear using bait, and has been fined US$1,800 and ordered to pay court costs plus $5,000 in restitution.

Charles W. Olsen Jr. was arrested in November, after a quick-thinking police officer noticed his car loaded down with pastries, took down his license plate number, and notified Game Commission officials at nearby bear check stations of his suspicions.

The restitution is reportedly the first of its kind under guidelines covering "trophy bears."

BC tabloid The Province has caught on to the fact that Polish newspaper Gazeta Olsztynska used an image including 4chan meme Pedobear in a story on the Winter Olympics.

The modified image's author, Michael Barrick, says it was also used by a Spanish sports blog.

Pedobear made an appearance at Anthrocon last year, handing out free candy.

Bears killed and devoured a monkey in front of horrified visitors at a Dutch zoo, officials and witnesses said.

Visitors reported that the grisly scene began as several bears chased the monkey, a macaque, onto a wooden structure at Beekse Bergen Safari Park.

They said a bear tried unsuccessfully to shake the monkey loose, ignoring attempts by keepers to distract it. The bear then climbed up and grabbed the monkey, mauling it to death and bringing it to its concrete den, where three bears ate it.

(Full article can be found on CNN)

Remember Chicago's "Cows on Parade" statues? Well, Zurich decided to follow suit, but use bears. Only this particular one, painted up in bondage gear, was deemed to be unsuitable for the place it was going, right next to some of Switzerland's most prominent banks. Full story on Yahoo! News

Apparently, according to the Tropical Medical Bureau news, Greenland is apparently to allow the hunting of polar bears - an endangered species - by the first half of the year.

Why they are doing this is beyond me -- polar bears are an endangered species; isn't there some sort of law to stop them?

SP

Animal-protection advocates filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to block Maryland's first bear hunt in 51 years, which they said was the product of flawed science.

State wildlife managers proposed the hunt in February after more than a decade of debate. They have said the two-week hunt, which would be limited to 30 bears and would begin October 25, will help contain an increasingly troublesome resident population of black bears.

[Read Article]

A bear raided a campsite cooler and drank 36 cans of Rainier beer, puncturing each with a claw and guzzling the contents before passing out drunk.

He tried one can of Busch and that was more than enough.

The bear was chased off the grounds, but returned for more beer the following day. He had to be baited with a trap containing the usual sweets and... two more cans of beer.

According to BBC News, a perplexing sight awaits visitors to the polar bear enclosure at Singapore zoo. Two of the bears have started to turn green.

A bear wandered into town and climbed a tree next to a local carlot.
Full story in the
Elizabethton Star
and the
Johnson City Press

Some climbers in Siberia, found a mummified paw, which they claim belonged to a Yeti. Russian scientists are working to verify the claim.

Link to the story on the BBC
Story on another news site