If you thought Black Friday shopping was bad, imagine a bear crashing your shopping mall experience. Well, just that happened at a Connecticut mall.
A large bear went charging through the parking lot at the Westfarms Mall in West Hartford, Conn. Shoppers saw the animal at a tree before it darted across the parking lot of the mall. ABC News and NBC Connecticut reported on the strange encounter. The bear was initially climbing a tree near Macy's.
"That's pretty crazy. I haven't seen a bear in a really long time. Normally, they're not like at the mall," one Westfarms Mall shopper, Brenda Morgan, told NBC Connecticut.
Bear At The Mall
"Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP) Environmental Conservation Police and Wildlife Division personnel responded to report of a bear in a tree near Westfarms Mall Friday afternoon. Upon arrival, staff located a yearling bear in a tree. Staff were successful in getting the bear to move on to woods nearby," DEEP shared in a statement to PEOPLE.
"It's much safer there," Elise Bouthillier, a DEEP public information officer, told NBC Connecticut. "If it should come down on its own later tonight — gotten into the road, gotten onto [Highway] 84 — it would have just been a much worse outcome for the bear."
Bouthillier noted that the number of sightings have grown in recent years.
"Last summer was incredibly busy for our officers, especially those in the northwest corner," she said. "We're starting to see them cross the Connecticut River and come more east, so they are spreading out. They are used to people. They associate, you know, people with dumpsters and dumpsters with food, and they want the easy food."
She said that people need to make bears afraid.
"We need to try to teach them that they don't want to be around people," Bouthillier said.
