Most of the time, humans are instructed to keep their distance from wild life and never help them in any way.
There have been many stories in the past of people getting into some serious trouble (sometimes even legal trouble) for trying to help out wild animals and inadvertently hurting them.
A man who attempted to help a young bison in Yellowstone National Park pled guilty to intentionally disturbing wildlife over the summer, and a Canadian man lost his job for trying to save a baby moose from a bear attack.
Sometimes the best thing to do is just to let nature take its course, as hard and as cruel as that can be sometimes. But what if an animal gets into a predicament where it was kind of our fault in the first place?
That’s what happened with this bear cub in Pennsylvania when it got its head stuck in a big plastic jar. According to the below post, a Pennsylvania park manager was riding along a road when she saw something that didn’t seem right.
When she stopped and got out of her vehicle and walked over to the thing that caught her eye, she quickly realized it was an animal in need of help.
Now this is where things get tricky, because there have been plenty of cases where helping out an animal in the wild actually ends up hurting them. On the flip side, there have also been plenty of stories where a mother bear attacks someone who gets too close to one of her cubs.
Those two concerns didn’t stop the woman from moving forward with her rescue mission as she went right up to the bear cub who had somehow got its little head fully stuck inside a plastic jar.
Without much warning, she walks right up to the black bear cub and starts pulling on the plastic jar. The baby bear starts pulling in the opposite direction while also swatting at the plastic jar itself, and the piece of garbage finally dislodges from around its head and the bear cub is free once again.
You would think that the bear would be a little shaken up and run off afterwards, but it actually sticks around for a second. I’d imagine it was probably a tad disoriented, and might even have been a little intimidated by the person who just helped them become unstuck.
As the bear cub sits on the roadside, peering at the woman who might have just saved its life, the woman starts talking to the bear as if it’s a pet of hers, saying:
“Come on, pull! There you go. You’re okay. You alright baby? You okay? You’re welcome. You okay? Yeah that was tough, wasn’t it? Get going!”
The bear never actually gets going, though it hopefully will be better off because of the help it received. I understand that we should stay out of nature’s way for the most part, but I don’t know if I could have just passed by as this bear cub struggled either.
However, I would have checked around really well for a lurking mother bear for while before I got involved…
Take a look:
