You’ve probably heard of sea turtles getting tangled in plastic bags or ducks getting caught in six-pack soda rings. This is often the result of humans carelessly littering their trash. And while we’re told to properly throw unwanted items away, reuse them, or recycle them, some people fail to see the consequences of their inability to do so.
We can’t force everyone to dispose of trash or recycle/repurpose recyclable items properly. But what we do have in our power is to fix what others have done. A family from Wisconsin did that late June when they were fishing in Marsh-Miller Lake and came across a swimming bear who had a plastic tub stuck on their head.
At first, the family, who were traveling by boat on the lake, didn’t realize the dangered animal was, in fact, a bear.
26-year-old Brady Hurt thought it was just a rock until it began to move. And his 52-year-old father, Brian Hurt, thought the creature was a dog. But then Brian’s wife, Tricia, had something else in mind.
“I said, ‘That ain’t no dog. I think that’s a bear,'” Tricia said. “We got closer and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a bear that got hungry and got its head stuck in a bucket.'”
So, the family paused their fishing and decided to carefully approach the bear to attempt to help.
In video footage, the family drives the boat as close to the swimming black bear, and when they get close enough, Brady pulls the empty, plastic cheese ball tub from the critter’s head. At the time of the removal, the bear was breathing heavily, and the tub had already began to fill up with water.
And it didn’t come off easily! If you’ve ever purchased a large tub of cheese balls, you probably know how large around the container is but how narrow the opening of the tub is, hence why the bear would have had difficulty removing it on his own.
Luckily, once the tub was removed, the bear was able to safely swim back to shore.
Tricia later found out that, that same bear had the tub on their head for at least three days. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources had been receiving reports from other lake visitors about the situation. However, they were unable to locate the bear themselves.
So, the Hurt family was very grateful that they were able to rescue the bear themselves.
“We just happened to be in the right place at the right time,” Tricia said. “We honestly believe if we hadn’t run into that bear, it wouldn’t have made it to shore. It was so disoriented, it didn’t know where [the] shore was and it was so tired.”
Watch the black bear get saved in the following video.
