A story of a missing husky discovered to be playing with a group of bears in Russia after his owner deployed a drone to find him is making the rounds on social media. The footage is quite remarkable, showing a dog running beside and bounding up to three bears as they make their way through high grass.
The only thing is, the story of it being a lost dog doesn’t appear to be true even if the footage is real. And the video appears to be from 2018 not 2024.
Unlike what is being currently reported on various social media channels – that the husky dog was missing and that his owner used a drone to find him and caught this footage – there is no news indicating that the dog was, in fact lost.
The dog’s breed is also unclear, as he was previously reported to be a Russian-European Laika dog by the Daily Mail UK five years ago. Laikas are a large breed of hunting dog who enjoy spending time in the wilderness and are natural hunters. The breed is known to be quite confident in woods where bears are present and that certainly “bears up” when watching this video. According to LaikaBreeds the breed can also be used “in programs for repelling nuisance bears from public places.”
Or maybe it’s not a dog at all but a wolf? Bears and wolves have been seen hunting together before, such as when a wild bear and wolf were photographed hunting together in Finland.
The three brown bears in this video are reported to have been near the village of Ust-Kamchatsk in the Russian region of Kamchatka when they were filmed. According to some Russian media sources, local residents said that the dog made friends with the bears during the Spring and went off into the forest with them. The drone footage was distributed by Ruptly, Russia’s state news agency. Not much more was revealed about the incident other than the bears don’t seem to mind the attention of the playful and curious dog. One of the bears even tussles with the animal.
The Kamchatka region is well known for its large bear population, because it is an area with large nature reserves where there is no legal hunting or poaching and the bears have year-round access to food, making the area a popular destination for photographers.
It’s not the first time bears and dogs have been filmed together. Some years ago there was a controversial video of a polar bear petting a Canadian Eskimo dog in Churchill, Canada. You can read more about that story here.
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