A grizzly bear at the Minnesota Zoo used a basketball-sized rock to shatter one of five layers of laminated safety glass at his exhibit.
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In this case, though, the glass just could not bear the rock’s impact as the animal repeatedly hit the panel.
Fisher told WCCO the bears weren’t being aggressive or trying to escape the enclosure when the shattering occurred, they were just playing.
The three orphaned bears, Sadie, Haines and Kenai, came to the zoo from Alaska in 2008.
The zoo agreed that the incident was unintentional, writing on its Facebook page: “The brown bear was exhibiting typical curious natural behavior, interacting with a found object just like it might in the wild”.
As harrowing as that statement sounds, the bear actually only broke one out of five layers of glass in the protective barrier.
Grizzly bears can grow to be 800 pounds, but like, don’t worry; bears be bearin’ out like bears tend to do. It might be that one of the people visiting the zoo at the time did something to upset it. So far, zoo officials have not made any comments on why the bear behaved the way it did.
The bears have been taken out of their exhibit until a replacement pane can be installed.
Staff suspect Kenai, a almost full-grown male bear, was responsible for the attempted break-out.
“He didn’t know what he was doing”, he said.
Ficker went on to say that he has witnessed bears throw rocks before, but none that size.
He told the newspaper that one of the creatures “picked up from the bottom of the pool a rock that had to weigh 50 pounds”.
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On this day, broken glass at an empty brown bear exhibit is the main attraction.
