In Kitchen Boxing Match, It's Man vs. Bear

Plus a bat-wielding heroine
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 29, 2019 9:18 AM CDT
In Kitchen Boxing Match, It's Man vs. Bear
This April 29, 2019 file photo shows a grizzly bear and a cub along the Gibbon River in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo.   (Frank van Manen/The United States Geological Survey via AP,File)

"You would've thought I was a Louisville slugger." So says Colorado's George Ann Field, who was lucky to find a baseball bat close at hand as she came face-to-face with a bear in her kitchen. It was her 71-year-old husband, Jon Johnson, who first discovered the mother bear and cub dining on a loaf of bread after entering through a screen door of the home in Pine Monday evening, per CBS News. "[The sow] was growling, I was growling," says Johnson. Then "she swatted me in the nose" so "I punched her in the nose." That's when Field came to the rescue. "All I remember seeing was a big brown blob in front of me," she says, adding she whacked the mother bear as hard as she could.

The sow was hit with the bat "at least three times," according to Johnson. The bear then ran into a wall, leaving a face-shaped hole, and back out of the screen door with its cub in tow. A second cub was seen outside on surveillance video, per KDVR. Johnson—who suffered cuts to his face, chest, and arms—believes bird feeders may have attracted the bears. Neighbors had recorded video of bears wandering the area and getting into trash cans ahead of the attack. A bear found early Tuesday and, in accordance with Colorado Parks & Wildlife policy, euthanized about half-a-mile from the couple's home; a DNA test will determine if it was the same bear. No cubs were found. (More bear attack stories.)

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