Welfare check on person finds their body being eaten by bear

[Clipper]

www.wjhl.com/news/regional/tennessee/authorities-investigating-after-bear-found-consuming-human-body-near-jellico/

That is about the third report of a bear eating a human in Tennessee this summer. The police were called to check on someone and found them dead with a bear eating their body. Twice over the summer there were incidents of bears eating humans. One case involved a man that had died of natural causes, probably a heart attack, while hiking in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and the other was a woman that was attacked and killed by a bear while hiking on a trail in a different portion of the park. This latest incident occurred to the West toward the Tennessee/Kentucky border rather than in the Gatlinburg area.

I would not feel real safe hiking the Appalachian Trail and sleeping in a lean-to with all the bear sightings, attacks, and bears found eating people unless I was carrying a gun big enough to fend off a bear attack. Hikers carry "bear spray." Nope. I wouldn't let a bear get close enough to me to spray it in the face.

I guess I am pretty safe from a bear attacks. I have no plans to walk from here to Maine on the Appalachian Trail anytime in the near future, haha.

[BHU]

I hear there were quite a few black bear sightings at Old Forge Campground last summer. One guy had his new Ford F150 scratched all to hell & his tonneau cover destroyed because he left a cooler full of food in the truck bed. When we camped there last year we took both our vehicles & I locked the coolers in the trunk of the wife's car, no food in the tents & no food scraps in the fire ring. Better safe then sorry.

[Ralph]

  It's 2020........folks have been staying home and fattening up since March.
They decided after a few months of that,  they better get out and get fit.
Those that hike are attracting  the bear's interest.  Better than a pic-a-nic basket Boo Boo.

[Clipper]

Oct 7, 2020 0:08:00 GMT -5 Ralph said:

  It's 2020........folks have been staying home and fattening up since March.
They decided after a few months of that,  they better get out and get fit.
Those that hike are attracting  the bear's interest.  Better than a pic-a-nic basket Boo Boo.

I imagine that there ARE an increased number of folks hiking than normal and I suppose that if a person dies of natural causes in an area populated with black bears, the bears are naturally going to scavenge the body. That seems to have been the case in a couple of the incidents. One that I mentioned involved an older man that was hiking in the Smokey's and died from what was thought to be a heart attack.

The Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge area is a tourist area much like Old Forge, surrounded by mountains and woods. Black bears are plentiful. We camped once at an RV park on the outskirts of Pigeon Forge and there was a bear that came to visit two evenings in a row. It was wandering in a common area that included the dog park and playground area. The owner of the park came around with a golf cart and an air horn attached to a can of compressed air. A couple of blasts on the air horn and the bear went running back into the woods. After the second visit the state game folks came and set up a trailer mounted bear trap and intended to trap and move the bear.

Kathy's nephew and his girlfriend were camped at the campground near the Enchanted Forest earlier this summer and they were visited by bears on a couple of different occasions. I think it was the same campground that BHU was talking about. On one of those occasions they came out of the shower house and there was a bear between them and their campsite and they had to hang out in the shower house until the bear ambled away. That was during the daytime. When I lived on Kayuta Lake I had to build a sturdy wooden structure around our garbage cans to keep out the bears and racoons. We had a burn barrel and burned our paper trash ( shame on me). I used to sprinkle the ashes with a bit of Clorox to deter any animals from being drawn to any scent left from burning food wrappers and picnic waste. If you live or hike in the woods you are invading THEIR territory and have to take whatever precautions necessary to coexist with them. My neighbor wanted the state to trap the bears and move them. The state told them that unless the bears were getting brave and unafraid of people or were menacing humans they would not move them and people should just keep their distance and not leave anything around to draw them. We lived on the North side of the lake where there was nothing but wilderness for a few miles between us and North Lake. Lots of wildlife. It was not unusual to see 15 or 20 deer walking across the ice in winter.

[BHU]

A couple weeks ago WKTV ran a video of a moose trotting along Newport Rd.

[Clipper]

I saw that, haha. They, along with elk, are making a comeback all over the country thank goodness.