Iwate town sets traps to try to catch the bear with a sweet tooth, with some even being installed inside people’s houses.

Bears have been in the news frequently in Japan recently, with a sudden increase in their boldness in entering human communities representing a potential threat to residents’ safety and homes…and now also their sweets.

Over approximately the past week, there have been at least 10 incidents of a bear barging into homes in the town of Shizukuishi, Iwate Prefecture, and helping itself to something to eat. But similarly to how you or I might fall in love with the local cuisine while traveling and spend every day eating it, so too has this bear apparently become smitten with the flavors he’s found inside people’s homes, as he’s been targeting their sweet snacks and desserts.

For example, Shizukuishi resident Kiyoshi Yamauchi says the bear has broken into his home no fewer than five times now, and while it initially sampled some pickles and cat food that had been intended for Yamauchi’s feline pet, the bear has shown a strong preference for things like karinto (a kind of crunchy Japanese rice cracker flavored with brown sugar) and vanilla cream sandwich-style cookies.

▼ The aftermath of one of the bear’s uninvited visits to Yamauchi’s home can be seen in the video at the point queued here.

Further illustrating its newly developed sweet tooth, the bear also broke into a wagashi (traditional Japanese confectionaries) workshop, where it managed to open up a refrigerator and then chowed down on some donuts it found inside, as both apparently the animal and the wagashi makers have a broad palate in terms of desserts.

The bear has also made repeat visits to the home of resident Yuta Matsubara, where it enjoyed some sweet-smelling powdered milk whose aroma can be detected even outside the container. Matsubara recorded video of his attempt to scare the bear off on one of its return visits, but you might want to turn down the volume on your device as his shouting is pretty loud.

The strongest display of persistence by the bear, though, has come at the home of one of Matsubara’s elderly relatives who lives nearby, whose home the bear broke into twice in one day, coming all the way into the kitchen and ransacking the fridge like a hungry teen, or at least how a hungry teen with no opposable thumbs but very sharp claws and apex predator-class brute strength would.

Matsubara says that while it was inside his relative’s house, not only did it consume the sugar it came across, it also tore open sacks of flour, apparently thinking they might be sugar too, before leaving them less than fully consumed after finding out they weren’t the sweet powder it was hoping for.

Now, with this happening in Japan, a country with famously low crime rates, and in the countryside, where people tend to be less concerned about potential burglars, you might think that the bear is getting into people’s homes because they’re leaving their front doors open, or at least unlocked. In at least some of the incidents, though, the residents’ doors were shut and locked, and the bear simply managed to exert enough force to break the door, its glass, or otherwise forcibly obtain entry.

In discussing the string of events, Kiyoshi Yamauchi, an associate agriculture professor at Iwate University, says that bears can indeed develop a preference for certain types of food, and that in summer they do become attracted to sweet flavors. This usually happens as a result of them searching out the most abundant, and thus efficient, sources of natural seasonal nutrition. With many sweet-tasting fruits and berries that they can scavenge in the warmer parts of the year, in summer that would ordinarily mean being drawn to things like cherries and strawberries. Now that this bear has learned that the interiors of human homes can be a consistent source of such sweet flavors, it’s going to be increasingly tempted to continue searching for them inside houses, and Yamauchi worries that it might not return to normal, non-invasive ways of satisfying those cravings.

Online reactions to the situation have included:

“Got the munchies, Mr. Bear?”
“He’s like me at 1:30 a.m.”
“Breaking into the same house five times in a week? That’s like working a regular job.”
“Bears are frighteningly good at learning and remembering things.”
“Well, I guess it’s better that he’s eating donuts than eating people.”
“I offer these donuts as tribute.”
“Who keeps their donuts in the refrigerator?”
“The bear probably thinks of the people’s houses as its vacation homes now.”
“This is cute, but also scary.”

That last one is really important, for as easy as it can be to forget when they’re acting adorably silly, bears can be extremely dangerous, especially once they become emboldened in their behavior around humans. The town has called for residents to exercise caution and report any bear sightings. As can be seen in the videos above, a number of tube-like bear traps have also been set up around the town, and in some cases, even inside resident’s homes, since the bear has shown it’s not shy about inviting itself in to see what kinds of snacks you’ve got.

Source: Nitele News, Teleasa News, YouTube/日テレNEWS, YouTube/ANNnewsCH (1, 2)
Top image: Pakutaso (edited by SoraNews24)
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