It was a relatively long day; I got up a little early, which is always nice. And on longer days, you expect to see and hear a few more stupid things than usual. Still, when I heard the reason why ostensibly sane citizens killed this bear, I felt like I’d been up a week.

The bear wandered into town, so they tranquilized it. Then they killed him, instead of releasing him or holding him … why? Because they had tranquilized him.  See, if they released him into the big woody woods with all those drugs in his system, and somebody shot him and ate him in the next two weeks, they might get sick.  So rather than keep the poor thing in a cage for a while, or putting a collar on him saying, “don’t eat this, moron,” they simply committed ursacide. Bear murder.

It bears noting that this happened in Fillmore, where there was recently one of the largest brush fires in California history. Which might explain why the poor creature wandered into the killing fields.