A bear that attacked and injured a 69-year-old Maple Ridge woman has been relocated and tagged along with her three cubs.
The bears were placed in a wilderness area north of Mission after BC Conservation Service officers found they weren’t a threat. They suspect the bears were on the five-acre property because their den was somewhere nearby, not due to attractants like garbage or bird feeders.
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“The bears weren’t in conflict at all – they had no bad habits,” Inspector Murray Smith with the BC Conservation Services tells Daily Hive. “[The mother] wants to keep the cubs close to the den until they get a little bigger.”
The woman was attacked at around 8 pm on Wednesday night after she saw the cubs on her property. She stepped outside to take a closer look when the mother ran after her and knocked her down, creating a laceration on her face. The mother and cubs then ran away.
The woman was sent to the hospital, treated for her injuries, and later released.
The conservation officer who attended the scene set a trap, and the mother bear was caught on Thursday morning. Her three cubs were found in a tree nearby.
Smith adds that very few bears are destroyed each year. Out of 3,500 calls about bear sightings in BC last year, only six were put down.
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