A family found a black bear in the Tennessee cabin they were staying in, but the hungry intruder wasn’t looking for trouble — just breakfast, according to a Facebook post.
Kiley Pickett-Suits and her family were visiting from Alabama for the Crimson Tide and Tennessee Volunteers football game, she told WATE. They didn’t expect to get uncomfortably close to a bear, much less fall in love with it.
The family had just left the kitchen after finishing breakfast when Pickett-Suits heard her dog growling, she said in an Oct. 20 Facebook post. She went back to check on the dog and spotted the bear in the kitchen, eating peanut butter out of a jar.
Thinking on her feet, she confronted the bear and scared it away.
“Kiley ran at the bear waving her arms screaming ‘get out!’ Mama bear to mama bear,” Tracy Pickett said in a Facebook post.
“I just remembered somewhere hearing that if you see a bear, not to run away, but to go towards it and act big,” Pickett-Suits told WATE
The bear got in through a door they left open to let bacon smoke out Pickett-Suits commented on a Facebook post.
The bear took the jar of peanut butter, a jelly spoon, the spoon in the peanut butter jar and her kid’s breakfast, she said.
The family later found out that’s not the bear’s first appearance in the area, Pickett-Suits said.
“He/she is apparently the neighborhood pet who everyone in the area has fallen in love with — including my family,” she said.
What to do if you see a bear
Black bears don’t often get aggressive when encountered, according to Bearwise.org.
If you see a bear, make sure it has an escape route and back away from it, the organization recommends.
“If a black bear does approach you, make yourself look big, make loud noises, clap your hands, and continue to back away,” said Jaime Sajecki, black bear project leader at the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
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