Lake Tahoe Black Bear Steals Cooler Out Of Truck, Helps Itself To Lunch

Hungry bears will always find a way.

Those that work and live out in bear country are instructed to bear proof pretty much all of their belongings – or at least the food related stuff. That means that garbage cans and coolers should be locked up like Fort Knox, or else the bruins will assert themselves.

This video out of Tahoe City, California shows that the repeated trope from The Yogi Bear Show, where Yogi and Boo-Boo would try to snatch up picnic baskets, must have been inspired by real-life events. Bruins – whether they be cartoon or not – have a nose for finding containers of food in the wilderness.

This particular brown bear had sniffed out a non-bear-proof cooler that a worker had left in the back of their truck. And it had no problem at all climbing up into the truck bed and stealing away the cooler, even with all kinds of people in the surrounding area trying to deter it.

Workers were yelling and flailing their arms, and the truck’s owner even triggered the horn of the vehicle to go off. The bear didn’t care one bit, since it was too busy trying to “crack the code” of the cooler.

Eventually, the bruin just opted to knock the container off the truck and drag it away so it could dig in. The smart black bear pushed it over the side of the truck bed, and then after trying a couple of more times to get it open, it quickly changed its plans and decided to drag it away.

According to first-hand accounts, the big ol’ bear finally figured out how to open the container once it got over to the deck by the parking lot. The bruin then made short work of the lunch that was stored inside, and once it was done eating, someone scared the bear away and the worker got their cooler back.

They probably need to get a new one anyways – preferably one that’s bear proof – after this incident: