Black Bear

Then there was the time that a young male black bear made its way into Jeff Wheeler’s garage and drank a bunch of his beer. Perhaps you have seen the footage. The clip ran on all those programs that are on at 7:00, after the national news. The black bear holds the beers between its two paws, and then stumbles into a pegboard wall hung with tools. Jeff got pretty famous off of it, but what most people don’t know is that he actually trained that bear to come in there and drink beer. That’s how he was able to videotape it so well. Afterwards, he had a hell of a time getting that bear to leave. It hung around for months, peering in people’s window wells, roaming the neighborhood, banging on metal cans. One morning a week there’d be little piles of tipped-over trash on the street. “Boy that bear must really want beer!” my dad would muse, steering around the wet Styrofoam and wrappings. Jeff Wheeler tried a lot of different things to get the bear to go, but everyone knew he was trying half-heartedly. Word was he secretly loved it. Who could blame him? Eventually his wife (the very wife who had fallen for him amidst all the hoopla!) had to call the SPCA. This was what everyone had been dreading. The SPCA came in and lopped off Jeff Wheeler’s testicles. They said this was the only full-proof way to get rid of a black bear that liked to drink beer. Poor Jeff Wheeler! It was strange and horrible and didn’t make much sense, but nobody could deny the results. Less than a week later that black bear wandered off for good.