Oh yeah, it’s all fine and good when they’re in a song or a zoo. But it’s a whole ‘nother thing when those bears get up close and personal with your garbage. Recently a Mama Bear decided to teach her two cubs the meaning of all-you-can-eat buffet using our garbage as the smorgasbord. Now I know that this is a fairly regular occurrence in the wilds of Franklin County. But I’m still a city girl at heart. And for a city girl, a bear poking around in my yard with an empty chocolate chip bag on its nose is a big deal.

My whole family stood out on the porch and watched in awe for a few minutes. With one foot behind the screen door, I was feeling pretty cocky. Mama bear looked up and we snapped a few photos. But I noticed that she looked just a bit disappointed as if to say "What, another family of vegetarians? I mean if we wanted nothing but nuts and berries, we would have eaten at home."

As much fun as we were having watching the bears try to make sense of a bag of Pirate Booty ('smell it, Ma … is it food? Or is Styrofoam'?), we knew it was time to discourage the bears when Mama bear began demonstrating how to use an overturned compost bin as a salad bar. We made a racket banging on pots, pans, and baking trays. The bears were not the least bit frightened and John decided it was time to take matters into his own hands. Taking a page straight from the "Manly Man’s Manual of Wilderness Survival" he boldly marched over to the bears — and waving a bright orange garbage bag – yelled "Shoo, Shoo!"

And while, no doubt, this is the exact technique one would want to use when faced with a grizzly, or perhaps a starving lion, our garden variety brown bears were not to be intimidated. In fact, this didn’t seem to startle the bears so much as annoy them. Mama Bear reared up — no doubt to show my 6’ 2" husband that she was every inch the man that he was. John, being as trusting as he is tall, continued toward the bear with nothing but his hunter orange garbage bag for protection.

By this point, Mama Bear was just plain irritated. I myself would get kind of grumpy too if I hadn’t eaten in months and some fool with an orange garbage bag kept interrupting my dinner. Mama Bear bared her teeth and growled at John. It was part growl and part hiss, really. Not unlike the kind of sound I might make if my children were whining with hunger and I had just come to the sudden realization that the Supreme Court had declared George W. the winner of the MoveOn.org Presidential Primary.

At that point, John scurried back to the safety of the porch and we came up with a new strategy for dealing with the bears in our garbage. It basically consists of this — we throw out better garbage, don’t wave things at the bears while they are eating our garbage, and no one gets hurt! It's a simple, but effective, survival technique.

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