Bear in my garage - residential bear deterrents

eshunt

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Dec 27, 2012
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So last night my dog woke me up barking. She never barks at night unless it's something out of place happening. Came downstairs and there was nothing out front or out back. She kept barking at the garage door, so I opened it. There was a bear that had opened my stand up freezer and was snacking on bacon, sausage and ground meat. Nothing quite like standing in my undies with what turned out to be three bears in my garage!!!

Anyway, I was able to open the garage doors and let them escape. Grabbed a pistol and inspected the damage. The bears had chewed their way into the garage through one of the wooden door panels. As we were cleaning up and bringing a few items inside the house, they kept coming back into the garage while we were right there. I really wanted to send a couple of lead pills their way, but we reside inside town limits and the cops really, really frown upon that kind of thing.

We had already installed some electric bear fencing on all three of the ground floor entry doors. These three bears had tried to break into the back slider last month and are apparantly very well habituated to people and even barking dogs. We ordered more supplies to continue the electric fence in front of the garage doors but it is going to be until Monday before we can have all the parts to complete the fencing. We made some nail-boards to put in front of the garage doors as a temporary deterent until then.

Do any of you folks have some good non-lethal bear deterrents in the mean time? Bag of ammonia with bacon wrapped around it? Experience with noisemakers/launchers? I don't want to try and use bear spray if they are inside the garage again, setting off one of those inside seems like a bad idea. And I don't want to lose all the wild game meat I have in my freezer or have my garage doors completely destroyed.

If we didn't live inside town limits, these bears wouldn't have a second chance at coming back, they would end up in the freezer themselves. But that is not an option so I am looking for any sort of deterrent I can use until the rest of the electric fence can be installed. I just hope that the fence around the garage will be enough and we don't have to do the same for the windows as well. We have cameras installed that send an alert to my phone upon motion/animal activity, but those don't usually wake me up in the middle of the night. I have lived in bear country almost my entire life and this is the first time I have had to deal with bears this aggressive and persistent.
 
That stinks.

Your wildlife people should be able to trap it. I'd at least reach out to them. Once they are human habituated, there isn't much of a solution other than to trap them out or shoot them.

Sure, your problem might be solved if you harden your place, but if they are going through walls, they'll like just move to the next neighbor.

Good luck.
 
Where do you live?

I don’t have real advice for you. I haven’t had bear problems. Removing food from the garage might help.
 
This is the Tahoe area. So bears have more rights than people.
We had a brown bear pull the bear can out from under it's encloser and beat it until it gave in our driveway... ADGF killed 80 bears this summer who were getting into trouble around Anchorage.

What about rubber bullets (shotgun)?
 

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