One bad parent equals two dead bears

How someone can be too stupid to bring a child to the park is beyond me, but obviously such a person exists. I’m talking about the parent who climbed over a wooden fence with his kid last Saturday at Maymont in order to get to the chain-link fence that separated two black bears from idiots like this.

Some of you might be wondering why the parent would want to get to the second fence. It’s pretty obvious: He had to get closer so his son could reach a hand through and feed one of the bears an apple. Duh. I mean, who doesn’t want their kid to hand-feed a grown black bear? Anything less would not be an authentic bear experience.

Anyway, guess what happened next? The bear – and this is going to blow your mind – actually bit the boy’s hand! Who saw that coming? Actually, the bear probably didn’t even mean to bite his hand. It probably just wanted the apple but bears have big mouths. And obviously the bear didn’t chomp down too hard. The kid still has his hand and all; he went to the hospital after being bit, and it turns out he didn’t even need stitches. One might argue that he didn’t deserve his hand after doing something so ridiculously simple, but he was only 4 years old. We have to give him a break. His parent, on the other hand (haha), needs to be caned.

This whole incident could almost be hilarious. The boy is still in one piece and he got to feed a bear. It would be funny except the bears were killed around midnight Thursday and buried in a landfill. Both of the bears had to go because nobody was sure which one bit the kid.

The decision, based on concern for human health, was made by park authorities and officials from the Virginia departments of Game and Inland Fisheries and Health. They decided that the only thing they could do to make sure the boy didn’t have rabies was to kill the bears, because you can’t test living ones for rabies. It didn’t matter that black bears hardly ever have rabies.

It seems to me that something else could have been done. The boy could have been given a rabies vaccination, for example. Six shots administered over a one-month period would have taken care of any possible problem, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That may seem like a lot, but give a kid ice cream and everything that came before it will be promptly forgotten. Ice cream is the least his parent could’ve done after letting him get up in a bear’s grill. My point is that the rabies shots would not have been traumatic – certainly no more so than having a bear bite your hand.

In case anyone was wondering, the two dead bears didn’t have rabies. So, yeah, they were killed for nothing. I think something needs to be done to justify their deaths. We could replace the bears with the boy’s parent, who is probably nowhere near as cute as a black bear but something to look at nonetheless. Or we could make that parent go out and find us two more bears, and then single-handedly get them to the park exhibit.

And of course there is the question of how Maymont will keep such an incident from happening again. The simple answer is to put up concrete walls around all exhibits of animals with teeth. We wouldn’t be able to SEE the animals, but Maymont apparently cares nothing for logic. And at least none of the animals would wind up dead because of the morons who just can’t get enough.