Two summers ago, we had a cute juvenile bear, hang out in the back yard of our mountain house and was out there literally every single day from June to August, 2022. When he saw us, he would run into the forest. It was hard to resist not feeding the little guy. Then, in May of last year at 5am, we discovered the biggest brown bear on our porch that I’d ever seen in the wild. Either our little bear had a sudden growth spurt, or this was a new guy who might have killed and eaten “our bear”. Either way, it was a reminder not to treat bears like stray yard dogs.
Bears are just very big dogs.
/s
Now that I think of it, there was a big “Dog-Bear” in North America that has been extinct for millennia.