Winter’s over, and that means that bears are no longer hibernating. It’s spring, and they’re ready to romp, play, and scavenge for food at campsites and at homes in nearby neighborhoods.

If you live in bear country, you probably know that there are certain precautions you need to take to prevent bears from causing damage to your property. For example, you don’t want to leave trash where bears can get to it, and you don’t want to leave your car doors unlocked, especially if there’s any food inside. Really, it’s best not to leave food outside at all.

Even when precautions like these are taken, there are still the random instances where bears find a way to get what they want. For example, a bear in North Carolina unlocked a couple’s minivan and climbed inside. What’s worse is that they didn’t realize this until they noticed that the minivan’s door was open, decided to close it and accidentally trapped the bear inside. You can bet the bear destroyed the inside of their minivan.

A more recent instance happened in Breckinridge, Colorado. Cate Siegel came home from an event and left a sealed, unopened package of gummy bears in her Subaru Forester. It was part of a gift basket that she received. She thought she locked the car doors before going in the house, but she must have forgotten.

In the morning, she walked over to her car to leave for work. She noticed that the car door was open and the garage door was up. She thought that was strange. She knew the garage door had been down the previous night.

Then she looked inside her car. It was completely destroyed. There was no way she could drive to work in that. It didn’t take too much detective work to realize that a bear had opened her car door. She thinks he smelled the gummy bears and tore her car apart in the process of looking for them.

As far as the garage door, Siegel believes the bear must have stepped on the garage door opener inside the car. She’s thankful that there wasn’t any trash inside the garage and that the bear didn’t do any damage there; however, the bear did get into trash bins in other homes in the same neighborhood.

Hear Cate Siegel recount the experience and the hard lesson she learned in the video below.

 

How would you react if you woke up and your car were in this kind of condition?