Nobody wants to discover an early-morning prowler in the backyard. But in a coastal city like Seaside, the last thing anyone might expect is for that prowler to be a black bear.
At 4:30am today, police got word of a bear in Laguna Grande Park. Seaside, Del Rey Oaks and Monterey police attempted to catch it, according to a Seaside PD press release. The bear got away and ambled 1.5 miles into Seaside, into a residential backyard in the 1100 block of Palm Avenue.
Police used the Reverse 911 system to alert people in surrounding neighborhoods and advise them to stay in their homes. Seaside police then shot and killed the bear.
A Seaside resident who asked to remain anonymous says his alarm had just gone off about 5:30am when one of his two dogs bolted through the dog door and after the bear, which was running through the man’s yard about 10 feet from the home’s back door.
“I said, ‘Holy shit, Pickles, get back here!” the homeowner says. The bear “was trying to get away from the cops who were going to kill it.”
Capt. Don Kelly of California Department of Fish & Wildlife says SSPD had the authority to shoot the animal. “That was their call,” Kelly says. “By the time I got there, the bear was already horizontal.”
Kelly says that while he won’t second-guess the SSPD’s decision, Fish & Wildlife might have tried non-lethal ways to “haze” the bear into the wildlands of Fort Ord, such as shooting it with beanbag rounds or disturbing its peace.
“In essence, they’re very docile animals. They’re not the killers that people and the media [portray],” he says. “Faced with a challenge, 99.9 percent of the time, they’re going to take flight instead of fight.”
Kelly says Fish & Wildlife receive several calls a year about black bears on the Monterey Peninsula; they are usually resolved without problems. The bear in Seaside was about 2.5 to 3 years old and most likely ventured out from the forest looking for food. “From a bear standpoint, they navigate by their noses. If the prevailing winds take the good smells from the city up to where they are, they will navigate to the food,” he says.
Bears have terrible eyesight, he says, and wouldn’t even notice the presence of most humans. The best way to handle a bear sighting, he adds, is to just make noise: “It’s going to head in the other direction. They do not want conflict at all.”
Still, the Seaside homeowner says he can respect the Seaside PD's decision to kill the bear.
“It’s very sad. Looking at that huge beast bleeding out on my yard was brutal, but I understand why they did it,” he says. “This was 5:45 in the heart of Seaside and that was not something they were even going to screw around with.”
Mary Duan contributed to this report.