‘Naughty' bears escape, steal a week's worth of honey and take long nap
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But the 5-year-old bears, much like most human
5-year-olds, appeared to want snacks more than anything else. The bears never made it beyond the staff-only food storage area, where park staff monitored them both on the ground and via CCTV until they voluntarily returned to their enclosure.
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The food delivery had just arrived an hour before, Habben said in an interview, and the bears bypassed the vegetables to head straight for the sweet treats. 'Just like kids,' he laughed.
The brother and sister plowed their way through the apples, bananas, and peanut butter before discovering the honey. They ripped the lid off the plastic container and took turns dipping their paws into the golden goo, 'making a right old mess,' Habben added.
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European brown bear siblings Mish and Lucy were rescued from a snow drift in the Albanian mountains when they were just cubs.
Wildwood Trust
With all the park's carnivores, the keepers do what is called recall work to condition them to return to their enclosures, Habben said. Hence, Mish and Lucy understand to return at the sound of a bell followed by the sound of their enclosure door sliding open, Habben explained.
Mish immediately ran back into the enclosure at the sound of door sliding open, Habben said, with Lucy following at the sound of the bell. They then proceeded to romp around their enclosure in the throes of a sugar rush before promptly falling asleep in what appeared to be a sugar crash coma. 'They're naughty bears,' Habben said. 'They're very naughty bears.'
This sort of 'incredibly inquisitive, playful, and adventurous' behavior is fairly typical for Mish and Lucy, who are still considered young bears, said Paul Whitfield, director general of the Wildwood Trust, in an interview. 'Them doing exactly what they're not supposed to is sort of what we expect from them.'
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Mish and Lucy are European brown bears, which are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a species of least concern, although the group notes that 'there are many small, isolated populations that are threatened.' In Albania, where Mish and Lucy were rescued, European brown bears are classified as vulnerable.
The bears were so young when they were found abandoned in a snow drift that their rescuers had to bottle-feed them, according to Whitfield. Their rescuers tried to release them back into the wild after they were weaned, 'but all they did was look for the people who were trying to release them,' Whitfield said.
They arrived in Wildwood Devon in 2021, where they now live in a 1.5-acre natural enclosure where they can play, climb trees, and be fed fresh salmon in the autumn, in addition to the nuts and berries they receive year-round, Whitfield said, describing them as 'incredibly pampered and spoiled bears.'
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Mish and Lucy will soon be living with two more cheeky young bears. Malenky and Nanuq are 2-year-old siblings who were born in a sanctuary
in Belgium to a mother bear who had been rescued from the conflict in Ukraine.
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