Canadian Curt Sheewe is used to seeing black bears in his North Vancouver neighborhood. There’s one particular bear who regularly comes by his home. But there’s one thing he has a problem with – it’s the bear’s habit of knocking holes in his fence.
Family’s fence broken by black bear.
Sheewe has lived on his property for nearly 10 years, and a local bear would regularly knock a hole in his old fence, which Sheewe would regularly patch up. A few months ago, the family installed a new fence. But it didn’t take long for the bear to come and knock down one of the panels.
So, he came up with a creative solution. He built a doggy door for bears. It was one of Scheewe’s kids who had the idea. “I think it was the kids, we’ve had big dogs in the past, who said, ‘Let’s do a dog door/bear door,’” he explained.
Scheewe made sure that the super-sized doggy door would open only for a bear-sized animal and weighted it so the family’s large dog couldn’t go through it. He wasn’t sure it would work, but it was worth a shot because neither he nor his neighbors wanted to interrupt the bear’s routine. Bears habitually use the same routes and Scheewe’s property happens to be the route to get to the Seymour River.
Scheewe told Global News, “Our neighbours, we all love the bear. We are careful with our garbage and our compost, but we enjoy being on the bear route. We don’t really want him to go away.”
A special bear door
But would the bear understand that the door was for him? Scheewe installed a surveillance camera to find out. And it revealed (what we already know), bears are smart! “Sure enough two weeks later he comes walking down the driveway and walks right through it like he’s done it 20 times,” Scheewe said.
His unusual solution is a big hit with local media and the local bear conservation group North Shore Black Bear Society. They posted a video that went viral and Holly Reisner, one of their members, said, “I mean the bears adapt to us, and they show us every day they can live peacefully with us, so it’s just so nice to see the residents going that extra step…In retrospect, it seems so simple.”
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