10-year-old girl stable after bear mauling in Port Coquitlam
Posted August 14, 2016 4:22 pm.
Last Updated August 14, 2016 4:26 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
PORT COQUITLAM (NEWS 1130) – The condition of a little girl who was attacked by a mother black bear Saturday afternoon has been upgraded from critical to stable.
The attack happened near a hiking trail close to the Coquitlam River. The bear was killed by conservation officers following the mauling, and its six-month-old cub was tranquilized and captured nearby about two hours later.
Conservation Inspector Murray Smith says the cub, which is about the size of a basketball, has been sent to a rehabilitation centre and will be released back into the wild at a later date.
“The rehabilitation facility has experience with orphan wildlife and specifically orphan bears,” Smith explains, “so they know how to raise them and hopefully raise them in a manner that eliminates as much human imprinting as possible.”
Smith says it’s not clear why the mother bear attacked the child instead of running away, but he has a theory about why the bears were in the area at the time.
He says somebody had left a bag of trash next to a secure bin “probably thinking that the municipality would come pick up their garbage, and then the bears discovered it first, and then of course once bears get hooked on garbage, they don’t want to go on to anything but.
“I think at the end of the day we’re probably going to determine that this was just a very unfortunate set of circumstances,” Smith adds.
