DENVER \u2013 A Colorado man had a rude awaking early Saturday morning when a roughly 400-pound bear flipped the lever doorknob to his home and rummaged through some dog food, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials said Monday.<\/p>\n
The homeowner, Ken Mauldin, grabbed a gun and shot the bear multiple times until it collapsed and died just after 2 a.m., said Rachel Gonzales, spokesperson for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.<\/p>\n
Nobody was injured, she said. Officers removed the animal from the house, located in the ski-resort town of Steamboat Springs. The couple had a legal right to shoot the bear if they felt threatened, Gonzales said.<\/p>\n
Colorado has about 12,000 bears and break-ins aren\u2019t uncommon in Rocky Mountain towns. People shooting and killing bears in self-defense, however, is rare, Gonzales said.<\/p>\n
This particular male bear was not tagged and the department does not know if it was involved in other break-ins, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSteamboat, that area, they\u2019ve been dealing with bears getting into homes all summer long,\u201d said Gonzales. \u201cIt\u2019s not impossible that this bear learned the behavior from another bear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Residents of Steamboat Springs are warned by the agency to lock doors and windows, secure their trash and recycling in bear-proof bins, and even take down bird-feeders to prevent these kind of confrontations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese types of incidents are preventable,\u201d said Gonzales. \u201cBears are very smart. Once they learn that it\u2019s easy to access food in a certain area, they are going to keep doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2013 A Colorado man had a rude awaking early Saturday morning when a roughly 400-pound bear flipped the lever doorknob to his home and rummaged through some dog food, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials said Monday. The homeowner, Ken Mauldin, grabbed a gun and shot the bear multiple times until it collapsed and died […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1332,120],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-38868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bears","tag-colorado"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38868"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=38868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}