B.C. woman finds bear eating oatmeal in kitchen

WEST VANCOUVER, B.C. – A woman in this suburb north of Vancouver had reason to feel like Goldilocks in reverse when she arrived home to find a bear eating oatmeal in her kitchen, police say.

The one- or two-year-old juvenile bear apparently entered through an open sliding glass door, broke a ceramic food container and started chewing down last Thursday, West Vancouver police Sgt. Paul Skelton said.

"It sounds like a nursery rhyme, doesn't it?" Skelton said. "At least we have a health-conscious bear on our hands."

Three police officers couldn't get the bear to budge, he said.

"The bear didn't appear to be aggressive and wasn't destroying the house, so they just let it do what it was doing and eventually the bear decided to make its way out of the residence and down toward a forested gully," Skelton said. "It ended the best it could."

The report was one of six complaints police said they received about bears in the area on Thursday.

One entered a trap that was placed in the area the same day but escaped and another sighting was near a school.

Skelton said bears in the suburbs north of Vancouver have been coming out of hibernation as hungry as ever but later than usual but this spring because of a heavier than normal snow pack from the winter.