Fort Collins
If there’s anything more riveting on TV these days than a group of attractive, shallow people “stranded” on a tropical island, it might be a clip of a drunken bear stumbling around with a head full of fermented apples.
And so on news broadcasts nationwide Tuesday, there she was, a real live Colorado black bear on the corner of Main and Second streets in Lyons, staggering and stumbling and trying to get up.
The bear had eaten rotten apples, viewers were told. The bear, they said, was “sloshed,” a “bear with a buzz” and “drunk as a skunk.”
Near the end of the video, a wildlife official shot the bear with a tranquilizer dart. The TV folks said the bear would be released back into the wild when she had “slept it off.”
On “The Tonight Show” that evening, Jay Leno mentioned the story and said the same tranquilizer dart method is used to deal with Ted Kennedy.
A nation chuckled.
Turns out the bear was not drunk. She was sick. In her final hours she was unable to eat or see or keep her balance. And on Wednesday night, as the sun faded behind the grassy foothills where the bear had roamed, she died in a cage – her life ended by a lethal injection mercifully delivered by a wildlife biologist.
“People want to associate wild animals with human behavior,” said Colorado Department of Wildlife veterinarian Laurie Baeten, who was with the young bear when she was euthanized. “And so they said she was drunk. It made a good clip. They wanted to look at this cute bear and see something that wasn’t there. They wanted to see a circus bear. It’s kind of sad.”
The final hours for the bear, a 2-year-old that weighed just 175 pounds, began Tuesday morning in Lyons along U.S. 36 midway between Boulder and Rocky Mountain National Park. The animal was spotted near an elementary school. The Division of Wildlife was alerted. TV news crews scampered.
The bear was several feet off the ground in heavy brush as the crowd, including townsfolk, closed in. Suddenly the bear fell hard, her head pitched awkwardly forward. She needed several seconds to get back on her feet. Then she fell again. She toppled sideways 10 seconds later and for awhile made no effort to get up. Eventually she got back on her paws and staggered slowly.
An unidentified TV camera operator asked a wildlife worker at the site if perhaps the bear was drunk. Possibly, he was told, but not likely. Very occasionally a bear will eat bad apples and react quite humanly to the alcohol.
But such a scenario was, on-scene wildlife manager Claire Solohub reiterated, not very likely.
Solohub, who later fired the tranquilizer dart, said a much more likely explanation was injury or disease.
But the drunken-bear story stuck.
On Thursday at the Fort Collins research facility, veterinarian Baeten leaned back slightly and sighed.
She and two other vets had just finished a two-hour necropsy on the bear carcass. The bear had not a trace of alcohol in her system.
“I have personally never verified any story of a bear eating fruit and becoming intoxicated,” she said. “Maybe it happens, but it would be very rare. Now songbirds, that’s different.”
The young bear hadn’t eaten in a day or more. After she was tranquilized she was brought to a DOW facility near Loveland. At 11 a.m., Baeten saw the bear for the first time.
“She was breathing heavily, which is not normal for a bear coming out of anesthesia,” Bae ten said. “By Wednesday morning, we didn’t see any improvement. She didn’t seem to be able to see.”
A handful of grapes were placed in the cage. The sow tried to eat but couldn’t. The bear was in her final hours.
At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Baeten and biologists gave her another dose of tranquilizer and prepared the heavy syringe of potassium chloride.
“It’s a tough thing to do,” Baeten said.
The bear was injected with the solution and her heart stopped.
The next morning, Baeten and pathologists tried to figure it out.
“The first thing we looked for was trauma. Being hit by a car was high on our list. But there was no sign of any trauma at all,” she said.
Tests will look for other possible causes. On that list, Baeten said, are rabies, West Nile Virus and toxic exposure from ingesting fertilizer.
“That’s common in bears,” she said. “We have no idea why they eat it, but they do.”
And the young bear from Lyons will stay with her awhile.
“At least we got to tranquilize her,” Baeten said.
“At least she didn’t feel anything at the end.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
