Four Los Angeles-area residents were recently arrested and charged with insurance fraud after allegedly using a bear suit to make it seem like their luxury vehicles had been damaged by a wild animal.

“Operation Bear Claw,” as this ingenious insurance fraud scheme was subbed by California authorities, began in January of this year, when the four suspects claimed that a bear had entered their 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost while it was parked in Lake Arrowhead and caused extensive interior damage. The area is located in San Bernadino, a region famous for its large black bear population, but the video footage supplied to the insurer by the suspects themselves was more than a little shady. It showed a furry animal entering the back seat of the Rolls Royce and scratching it, but something didn’t add up. For one, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife says that the only bears in the state are black bears, and this was light brown, but its movements weren’t very bear-like either.

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A number of black bear cubs in California have been exhibiting unusually friendly, dog-like behavior around humans, and scientists believe a brain illness may be to blame.

Last month, California Department of Fish and Wildlife picked up a bear cub from a residential backyard. The animal had simply moved in there and didn’t seem to be intimidated by people at all. She picked up apples and ate them in front of the humans on the patio, and at one point jumped into a housekeeper’s open car trunk. This was not normal behavior for a brown bear cub, but the most concerning thing was that veterinarians in California had seen it before…

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Wild animals usually get put down after attacking humans, but a Russian zoo keeper who lost one of her legs to a caged bear has been pleading with authorities to spare the animal, claiming that it wasn’t to blame for the tragic accident.

On September 25, experienced zoo keeper and animal activist Vera Blishch was instructing a new colleague at the Municipal Zoo in Ussuriysk when a bout of vertigo made her lean towards a bear cage for just a split second. Unfortunately, that was just enough time for Manyunya, a 20-year-old female bear, to reach through the bars and grab the zookeeper’s leg. She suffered severe injuries, including multiple fractures, and eventually needed to have her leg amputated below the knee at a Ussuriysk hospital. Knowing that animals that attack people are put down to eliminate the risk of them attacking other humans, Blishch’s first concern upon waking from her surgery anesthesia was for Manyunya’s well-being, insisting that the bear was not to blame.

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İbrahim Sedef, an experienced beekeeper from Turkey’s Black Sea Region, has come up with an ingenious way of having his honey tested by the same bears that used to steal it.

Agricultural engineer and beekeeper İbrahim Sedef had been struggling to deal with thieving bears for over four months, but nothing worked. When he tried covering his precious beehives with steel cages, the bears toppled to get to the precious honey, when he reinforced the cages with a cement base, they just dug in the ground and toppled them again. Even raising the hives higher up didn’t help as the bears just climbed up to reach them. So earlier this month, Sedef decided to stop looking for solutions and at least use the bears’ appetite for honey to his advantage.

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Katya, a 36-year-old brown bear, is the only prisoner at the UK-161/2 penal colony in Kostanay, Kazakhstan, to be serving a life sentence. Ironically, even killers imprisoned here have sentences of no longer than 25 years.

So what could a bear do to end up in prison? Well, Ekaterina, or Katya as most of the 730 inmates at UK-161/2 call her, was put behind bars in 2004, after injuring two humans. Like a lot of her fellow inmates, the brown bear had a troubled life. Katya was abandoned by circus performers visiting Kostanay when she was still just a cub, and then locked in a cage near a popular camping site, as a tourist attraction. It was at the Belaya Yurta campsite that she committed the “crimes” that landed her in the strict regime prison, 15 years ago.

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A family in Yunan Province, China, recently had to give up the pet puppy they had bought two years ago after it grew into a 250lbs black bear.

Su Yun, who lives near the city of Kunming, bought the animal two years ago, while on vacation. At the time, she thought she had paid for a Tibetan Mastiff puppy, one of the most highly-regarded dog breeds in China, and didn’t much care that it was sold by a random man on the side of the road. The price was good and the puppy certainly looked like it was going to grow up to be an impressive specimen. Little did she know that the “puppy” would exceed all her expectations, at least in terms of size.

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What comes to mind when you think of Siberia? Maybe vast expanses of snow-covered land, teeth-chattering cold, Lake Baikal, and the Tunguska meteorite mystery. How about gun-totting brown bears? One such animal recently gave a hunter quite the fright, but more importantly, took off with the man’s bag, which happened to contain two firearms.

The incident took place in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, where an unnamed 57-year-old hunter stopped at a cabin in the woods, miles away from the nearest human settlement. He left his belongings there and went to get some water, only to find a brown bear prowling around the cabin. The man panicked and ran into the woods, leaving his guns behind. He only notified the local police about the incident after several days of searching for the weapons to no avail. For all we know, the furry offender may now be roaming the taiga with a Vepr carbine and an IZH shotgun in tow.

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Svetlana and Yuriy Panteleenko seem like a perfectly average family, but that’s until they introduce you to their 23-year-old adopted son, Stepan, a 300-lb brown bear. The unlikely family do almost everything together, right from playing in the backyard, to cuddling and watching TV on the sofa.

Stepan was just three months old when the Panteleenkos adopted him. He had been found by hunters after reportedly losing his mother and was in very bad shape. So they took him in and have been happily living together for the last 23 years. The couple say that because Stepan has been domesticated from a very young age, he has developed the gentlest temperament. He loves nothing more than hugging his parents every chance he gets and cuddling next to them on the sofa in the evening. “He absolutely loves people and is a really sociable bear – despite what people might think, he is not aggressive at all. We have never been bitten by Stepan,” Svetlana says.

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Apparently, the temptation to click a selfie with a large, furry (and dangerous) bear in the background is simply too hard to resist for some people. An alarmingly large number of tourists at South Lake Tahoe in California are taking in this latest craze despite warnings from the US Forest Service to leave the animals alone, or risk facing a gruesome end.

Most people don’t seem to realize that while bears are normally timid creatures, they are also quite unpredictable. “Bears are unpredictable, wild animals and may attack if threatened,” said Forest Supervisor Nancy Gibson. “We can’t have visitors creating dangerous situations for themselves and others. People are risking serious injury or death if they get too close to a bear.”

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48-year-old Blazo Grkovic has made headlines in the international media after it was reported he managed to kill a bear in combat using only a small carpenter’s ax and his bear bare hands. The incident occurred while the brave Herzegovian was herding his flock of sheep on the edge of a forest at the foot of Volujak Mountain.

Gacko, as he is known among friends, told the press he was guarding his sheep on the slopes of Volujak Mountain at dawn, as he usually did. Suddenly, a bear jumped out of the bushes and grabbed him by the leg. No stranger to combat situations, the former first-class fighter of Gatačkoj Brigade in the Bosnian War of 1992 instinctively reached for his trusty carpenter ax and hit the animal in the neck, knocking it on its back. Instead of running away, like most other people in his situation would have done, he jumped onto the bear and continued hitting it. Although he doesn’t remember too many details about the fight, or how long it lasted, Blazo says that at one point the animal managed to knock the ax out of his hand, and he recalls having one arm in the bear’s mouth and the other on its neck trying to suffocate it. Grkovic sustained dozens of injuries to his arms, legs and face during the epic struggle, but ultimately managed to kill the attacking bear. Unable to walk, he phoned his brother for help, and when he arrived with an ambulance, they found him next to the almost decapitated body of the bear.

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Juuso, a large brown bear from the Predator Animal Center, in Finland, only agreed to crawl into his shelter and hibernate, after his best friend tucked him in.

With winter drawing ever nearer, Juuso, a young brown bear from Finland’s Predator Center, seemed tired. All the other bears had already began their winter hibernation, and Juuso’s eyes were closing all the time, but refused to go into his man-made lair. You’d think he was suffering from insomnia, but in fact, all he really needed was to be tucked-in by his best friend, caretaker Sulo Karjalainen.

Sulo has been making sure the animals of the Predator Center have everything they need, and in turn, this ferocious creatures accepted him as a friend. To make sure Juuso gets some shut-eye during the winter months, Sulo went into the bear’s lair first, and his furry friend followed shortly. Happy and relaxed in the company of his friend, Juuso soon laid his head on his bed of straw, sighed and finally went to sleep. All I can say is: Sleep tight Juuso!

Watch a video of Juuso and Sulo, at the bottom.

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We all know sleeping in a bear-inhabited forest can be pretty hazardous to your health. That’s what artists Eiko Ishizawa was thinking when she designed her Bear Sleeping-Bag.

Unless you take all the necessary precautions, like wrap the food and hang it in a tree as far away as you can, chances are you’re going to be mauled by a bear, while camping. Ok, so it doesn’t happen that often, but the point is now you have an extra safety measure. The bear-shaped sleeping bag makes you look just like a bear and if you’re lucky enough, hungry bears will probably mistake you for the real thing and leave you in one piece.

But there are some risks once you strap on this comfortable outfit. You might run into a horny bear who wants to have his way with you or maybe some rednecks with guns could spot you and see nothing more than another hunting trophy. The point is you should think twice before sleeping in the Bear Sleeping Bag.

Just in case you feel you want one, check out Eiko Ishizawa’s official site and see if you find one for sale.

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Well, it’s not exactly the blonde we’re used to, but it’s as blonde as a black bear can get.

Known as a Spirit Bear or Kermode Bear, this polar-bear look-alike was thought to exist only in Indian mythology. Brave photographer Steven Kazlowski took some photos of a Spirit Bear, an achievement considered impossible among wildlife photographers. 39-year-old Steven went through a one-one-one encounter with one of these great white beasts, but managed to escape with his life.

It’s important to mention that Spirit Bears are not albino animals, they’re what you can call a blonde black bear. They are extremely rare creatures and because of extensive logging around coastal temperate rainforests, their habitat has shrunk even more.

Photos by Steven Kazlowski, BARCROFT MEDIA

via Daily Mail