A bear that roams a Japanese supermarket for 2 days is smothered in honey, then killed

A bear that roamed a Japanese supermarket for two days was lured with honey-coated food, local officials said. The animal was trapped and killed on Monday, police said.

Japan has a growing problem with bearswith record six deaths in attacks and more than 9,000 animals were killed in the last fiscal year.

In the latest incident, police received an emergency call early Saturday morning that a bear had mauled a 47-year-old man at a supermarket in Akita, on Japan's main island of Honshu. Japan Today reported that the man, a shop worker, was expected to recover.

The scar on the man's head “will take at least a week to heal once the stitches are removed, according to the doctor,” a police spokesman told AFP.

The supermarket was evacuated and the animal was left inside, where it destroyed the meat department, according to the Asahi Shimbun daily.

Finally on Monday morning, the bear got into a trap containing “rice bran, bananas, apples and bread, all smeared with honey,” an Akita official told AFP.

“We prepared two traps, one of which caught a bear behind a supermarket,” he said.

The animal was killed on Monday, Japan Today reported, citing police.

Cooperation with bears is on the rise in Japan

Deaths from bears in the fiscal year to March 31 include an old woman who was attacked in her garden and a fisherman named March. a severed head was found in the lake. A bear attack was also suspected after the attack on a college student he was found dead on a mountain in northern Japan.

This period had the highest number of deaths since the government began collecting data from 2006 to 2007.

More than 200 other people are involved in bear incidents.

In this financial year so far, three people have been killed.

Experts told CBS News that as Japan's population shrinks, people leave the countryside, and bears move in.

“Then that area reverted to forest, so the bears had a chance to expand their range,” biologist Koji Yamazaki, of Tokyo University of Agriculture, told CBS News.

Other factors include climate change affecting omnivores' food availability and sleep patterns. This summer tied for Japan's warmest on record.

In the last fiscal year, 9,097 bears were killed, more than double the previous year, according to the environment department.

Local media reported that authorities are having trouble finding enough hunters to shoot the animals, citing Japan's shrinking and aging population.

The country has two types of bears: moon bears and the big brown bear, which can weigh up to 1,100 kilos, is bigger than a human and, in Japan, lives only on the large northern island of Hokkaido.

Last August, hunters killed an unidentified brown bear named “Ninja” in Hokkaido after it attacked at least 66 cattle. The Associated Press report. Also, in October 2023, local Japanese officials and media reported that three bears were tortured after being killed. sneaking into the tatami mat factory in the northern part of the country.