“It’s something crazy…”: the two witnesses who filmed the scene were stunned. In front of her, laughing people are tearing away teddy bears hanging from a tree... Just to take a selfie. "All this to be able to say: 'Take a photo of me, put it all over the networks, I'm holding a brown bear cub in my arms'", comments, annoyed, one of the two witnesses. Once the photo was taken, one of the cubs even ended up falling to the ground, lost, before running away. "They chased him after that to try to get him back, but eventually a maintenance worker intervened and told them to stop," Rachel Staudt, one of the witnesses, told ABC News. The young woman then called the police and provided them with the video which the American media broadcast.
Biologist Ashley Hobbs, dispatched to the site by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, finally found the poor, frightened little animal in a retention pond. He was “wet and cold” and “alone for some time.” “He probably had a traumatic experience,” said the specialist. The bear cub was taken into a center to recover and will soon be released into the wild. Bears sometimes leave their cubs in a tree while they go looking for food. “We found the people who pulled the bear from the tree and (…) explained to them how irresponsible and potentially fatal it was for this cub to be separated from its mother,” concludes the biologist.