Unhappy ending as bear plays Goldilocks

Men are men, bears are bears, and never the twine should meet. In Colorado, the state’s parks and wildlife officials recently shot dead a bear that spent six hours trashing a house looking for food even as the owner slept soundly upstairs.

How could he sleep through a hungry bear’s rampage through his kitchen? He had installed surveillance video at his place, silly. It did not prevent an ursine break-in, true, but it did capture the bear standing on its rear legs and opening the refrigerator to ransack its shelves. The bear got shot because, the officials said, he charged back at the house after leaving it. The officials claimed it was the same bear who had taken ice-cream and M&M from another home and forced a woman to lock herself in her car as he prowled around her garage.

Any self-respecting child in the West has heard the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears. This little blond girl walked into the bears’ home, tasted and ate their porridge, broke the little bear’s little chair and slept in his bed, only to wake up and run away when the bears came back home. What if the bear who raided homes had heard the tale, too, and merely wanted sweet revenge? Now, we are firmly on human ground: the moral dilemma of restitution for past crimes. Grin and bear it, would have been a better response than shooting the bear dead.