Man Attacks Bear With Dog in Its Mouth

What do you do when you see a black bear trying to make a meal of your beloved dog? Kaleb Bentham of Grass Valley, Calif., had a chance to find out how he would react to such a scenario when a 350-pound bear clamped its jaws on the head of his pit bull, Buddy, on the day before Thanksgiving and tried to drag the dog away. "I just ran down there, plowed into the bear, tackled it and grabbed it by the throat and started hitting it in the face and the eye until it let go," he tells CBS 13. The bear released Buddy, but the terror wasn't over for Bentham. "My first thought was that I was going to lose him," he says. Bentham rushed Buddy to the nearest vet, but the office was closed because of a positive COVID-19 test.

A second animal hospital was open, however, and was able to patch Buddy back together. Buddy, who Bentham rescued from a shelter a few years ago, is now on the mend. But the bear seems to be holding a grudge after losing its Thanksgiving eve feast. Bentham tells CBS that it's been back to the house several times. "It made an attack and had its food and its food got taken from it and it wants it back, I feel like," he says. There is a population of some 30,000 to 40,000 black bears in California, per Newsweek. And while the animals often eat ants and other insects, they will eat "whatever seems edible." (More bear attack stories.)