A black bear walked into a shopping mall on a military base in Anchorage, Alaska on Sunday morning, stole a peach from the grocery store, ate it, defecated in the hallway, and left. According to the New York Post, which was citing local station KTUU, the whole thing was caught on camera. The bear had no further comment.
How the Bear Did Its Shopping
The bear entered the commissary at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson around 9 a.m. Sunday. Not through a broken window. Not through a loading dock. Through the automatic doors, like a person who has places to be.
Kory Godbout, a barber at the base's barbershop, told KTUU he was waiting for his first customer of the day when his coworker screamed "Bear!" He looked up from his phone. The bear was walking directly into the barbershop. Godbout and his colleagues did the sensible thing and sprinted into the break room.
After a few minutes of hiding, they came out, followed the bear into the commissary, and watched it take a peach from the produce section and eat it. Surveillance footage captured the whole heist. The bear apparently found what it was looking for, because it did not linger over the other options.
The Part Where It Gets Worse
Some bystanders, apparently unbothered by the situation, tried to scare the bear out of the grocery store. This did not work. The bear, unmoved by the crowd's energy, turned around and walked back toward the barbershop.
Godbout and company sprinted back, locked the door, and watched from the window. That is when, as Godbout put it to KTUU, the bear "decided to, you know, use the restroom in the hallway."
The bear then left. Its Sunday errands, apparently, were complete.
The Military's Response to a Bear Doing a Poop in a Hallway
Officers from Conservation Law Enforcement responded to the scene and directed the bear toward a river and into the woods, according to a JBER spokesperson cited by the New York Post. Which is a sentence that required real human beings to write and file.
JBER's wildlife program manager Colette Brandt issued a press release confirming that the bear had triggered the automatic doors on its own and that the whole incident was "entirely incidental." That is the official military position. The bear did not intend to defile your commissary. It just happened.
The Larger, Somewhat Darker Context
Here is the part of the story that stops being funny for a second. The New York Post notes that JBER has installed bear-resistant dumpsters, which have reduced bear-related calls in the area. Progress.
However, over the past year, seven bears have been put down at the base for public safety reasons. Seven. This particular bear got lucky. It walked in, grabbed a peach, evacuated its bowels on government property, and walked out alive. For a bear at JBER, that is genuinely a good Sunday.
The bear's current whereabouts are unknown. Presumably somewhere in the woods, unbothered.
The Dingo Take
Look, the news is exhausting. Wars, corruption, the slow-motion collapse of democratic institutions, the general sense that the people in charge have absolutely no idea what they are doing. And then, on a Sunday morning in Anchorage, a bear walks into a mall, eats a peach, takes a dump in the hallway, and walks out. And somehow that is the most coherent and principled behavior we have witnessed from anyone connected to a government building in years.
The bear knew what it wanted. It went and got it. It left when it was done. It did not hold a press conference. It did not blame the peach. It did not claim the hallway was actually in great shape when it arrived. There is an argument, and we are making it, that this bear demonstrated more self-awareness and follow-through than most of the people currently running the country.
Seven bears have been killed at that base in the past year for being too close to humans. This one pulled off the most audacious grocery run in Anchorage history and got a police escort to the river. Respect where it is due. Go live your life, bear. You earned it.
