They Shot Paddington Today

I don’t know if any of you saw the news story this morning on the BBC Website about the bear with a jar stuck on its head but something about it struck me as odd. I think it’s maybe some of the quotes from the people involved in dealing with the bear.

The article says that the local wildlife service had been following the bear for three days as it wandered around, unable to eat or drink and looking like a 1930′s movice serial spaceman.

I admit that their reasoning for having to shoot the animal sounds plausible at first, it was starving and had wandered into the middle of town. I’ll buy that, it’s a powerful wild animal and is likely to snack on anything it manages to get its claws on. Then I thought, well why didn’t they just shoot it with tranquiliser darts? Well rather amusingly they couldn’t tranquilise the beast because (quoting what the guy in charge told the BBC) “it stayed in forested areas”.

IT’S A BEAR where did you expect to find it, selling pirate DVDs at the Barras?

Also note the picture that accompanies the article. If someone could get close enough to take that picture, someone else could get close enough to tranquilise the poor big bastard. Especially since the wildlife officers had been chasing it around the countryside for SIX DAYS. Let’s be honest here, someone in Minnesota just REALLY wanted a bearskin rug. They might as well have claimed he was a muslin extremist or had weapons of mass destruction in his jar.

No word either on what’s to happen to the arseholes that left the giant jar lying around the countryside for the bear to get stuck in either.