Natural food doesn't help a bear's morals

On this blog we've seen bears stealing pizza, cake, candy, and submarine sandwiches. But like the rest of us, these junk food junkies sometimes take a stab at keeping to a natural food diet. And at this time of year, bulking up for winter, they'll stop at nothing to get it. The destruction above was left behind by bears that stole over a thousand dollars worth of honey from the Ballard Bee Company in Washington State.

And in Colorado, state wildlife officials suggest that birds are just going to have to go hungry till bears go into hibernation. They're telling people to leave their bird feeders empty to prevent the same kind of thing from happening in your backyard. (see the photo over at our Tumblr).

Not every government just lies down and takes it when bears behave this way, though. In coverage of the Ballard Bee devastation, Metro mentions one case where the justice system took this sort of thing seriously: In 2008, a Macedonian court convicted a bear of stealing  honey after a beekeeper's desperate attempts to ward it off with loud music failed when his generator ran out of power.

Still, although this was a righteous act of symbolic justice, the bear, as usual, got off scot-free:

Since it had no owner and belonged to a protected species, [the court] ordered the state to pay the 140,000 denars ($3,500) damage it caused to the hives.

There was no information on the whereabouts of the bear.