/h
Posted on 10/20/2011 1:31:53 PM PDT by smokingfrog
A Zanesville cop who was hunting down ferocious animals released by their owner came within just a few feet of being mauled by a charging bear, killing the animal with a single shot from his service revolver.
The black bear dropped dead just seven feet from Deputy Jonathan Merry, he told ABC News.
Merry and other deputies relived their efforts to stalk tigers, lions, wolves and bears into a rainy night that at times left them feeling like the hunted. By Wednesday afternoon, 49 of the 50 animals released by Terry Thompson were confirmed dead, ending a potentially catastrophic threat to people in the area.
Merry, an animal lover who grew up on a farm, was the second officer to arrive at Thompson's private preserve in Zanesville, Ohio, Tuesday evening. Thompson had killed himself with a handgun moments after releasing his dangerous menagerie.
Merry, 25, arrived to find a Bengal tiger, two black bears and a female African lion contained by nothing more than a livestock fence along the roadway.
When a wolf started running south, the officer followed it in his patrol car.
"It turned west, which is opposite, even further of the Thompson residence. I was then instructed by my sergeant over the radio to take the wolf down," Merry said.
He pursued the wolf into a hay field, got out of his vehicle and shot it.
But soon, he was facing another, much larger, problem. His commanding officer told him a lion had been cornered back at the Thompson home. He headed back, but instead of finding a lion, he was confronted by an angry bear.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Got to be more to this.
Man, these cops must have been poppin wood all night long. Couple of notches up from the family dog one could say.
hope he gets a nice rug out of the deal!
Wonder if his bowel control is as good as his gun control appears to be?
I’d like to know what kind of pistol he’s using to get a one shot kill on these large animals.
Has to be more. WTH was his sidearm? S&W 500, Desert Eagle or Magnum 45-70?
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The .88 magnum. It shoots through schools... and bears.
Back at the Donut shop....
“Yeah, I coulda fired a full 10 seconds earlier, but I figured I’d wait and get a better center-mass shot.”
Other cops:
“OOohhh!!”
Couldn’t he have stopped the charging bear by cutting up it’s credit cards?
I don’t believe for a minute these animals were “charging” these cops. They were semi-tame caged animals, confused and wandering about. Cops have a lot of experience shooting people’s dogs though so it probably was a “one shot”.
That’s the same gun that brought down the Bat Plane. Okay, it’s not. It’s Joe Piscopo’s gun from Johnny Dangerously.
John Taylor, who was a professional hunter in Africa many years ago, wrote about hunting lion with a single shot rifle. If you’ve seen video of a charging lion, they are unbelievably fast. He would wait until they were a few yards away before firing. As soon as he could afford it, he went to a double rifle. Even though it would have taken a while, I think I would have saved up for a double rifle to begin with.
It was a black bear. Dangerous but not exactly a grizzly either.
.357 Magnum would do it with good placement.
Might not have been a very big bear anyway.
GLIDE — Aaron Wyckoff didn’t start to panic until his .45-caliber pistol quit firing, and the bear kept chewing on his arm.
So, he recalls, he tried to pull the bear’s jaws apart. Then he tried to roll down the ridge where he and the bear were wrestling. But the bear grabbed his calf, pulled him back and went for his groin.
Wyckoff said he countered by shoving his pistol and his hand into the bear’s mouth. But by then, the struggle in the Cascade Range in Southern Oregon attracted the attention of Wyckoff’s party, and other hunters rushed over.
Justin Norton fired a round from his .44-caliber pistol into the black bear’s stomach, to no avail. He approached the bear, put the gun behind its ear and fired again. It finally rolled away.
“I walked right up to his head, and he didn’t even look at me,” said Norton, 26.
With the dying bear still struggling, a final round finished him off.
“He was dead. He just didn’t know it,” Wyckoff said. “It was just all adrenaline.”
Wyckoff was helping friends track a wounded bear May 31 on the last day of the hunting season.
Fifteen-year-old Chris Moen of Glide, who had drawn the tag, hit the animal in the shoulder with a .338-caliber rifle round, but he and his father couldn’t pick up a trail of blood.
They called on Wyckoff and friends to help track it. A few hours later, Wyckoff went up a hill for a view.
He heard a rustling in the bushes behind him, then a grunt. The bear had apparently circled around the group.
“We never even heard him,” said Wyckoff.
Wyckoff said he fired a round into the bear’s forehead, but the animal kept coming and climbed on top of him. From beneath, Wyckoff said, he got off three more rounds.
Then he tucked the gun beneath the bear’s chin. But it quit. Wyckoff, left-handed, said he had accidentally released the ammunition clip.
After the attack, Wyckoff sat still, not wanting to move for fear the bear had ruptured the femoral artery in his groin. Mustering the courage to look down, he saw his shredded jeans, but not much blood.
At the hospital, a surgeon sewed him up, astonished that the bear had missed every major artery, as well as Wyckoff’s tendons.
After two days in the hospital, Wyckoff was discharged, with orders to stay home from work for at least two weeks.
His right arm remains bandaged. Silver staples hold gashes together.
His .45 is covered with teeth marks but still works.
The bear weighed more than 260 pounds after field dressing. It has since been sent to a taxidermist.
Wyckoff said he’s grateful for his friends’ quick actions and that he stayed firm when his 10-year-old son tried to go along that day.
Would Wyckoff hunt down another bear?
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Fall bear season starts back up in August.”
Zanesville Cop Killed By Charging Bear
There’s no such thing as a “tame” animal of this type. I met a woman who ran one of these refuges - like all of them, she was a “nice kitty” nutcase - but even she pointed out that as soon as she turned her back on the tigers even in their cages, they started stalking her. That’s just their nature.
And that’s why they shouldn’t be kept in these do-it-yourself zoos.
Typical clueless news heads.....”...service revolver...” Not too many revolvers in use by police departments these days.....of course maybe they do use a revolver, and the officer misspoke.
Minor point.
Great shot officer!
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