Listen to me. This is serious.
When your house begins to rumble, grumble, and snore it is past time to see an expert. No, I don’t mean an exorcist. I mean the kind of expert that can make a huge bear feel emotionally vulnerable to the point that the bear just runs away, crying and doubting their individual worth.
The kind of expert that can hurt a bear’s feelings. A bear bully, if you will.
There is a family in South Lake Tahoe, California, and this family began to hear rumbling, grumbling, snoring sounds months ago, at the beginning of winter, coincidentally. But the sounds apparently “didn’t make sense” to them. So they did what humans do when faced with unexpected circumstances….they ignored it and hoped it would go away. I mean who hears a grumbly rumble and immediately thinks “I bet there is a bear in the crawl space!” (which also sounds like a trauma inducing children’s book or an especially demented Milton Bradley board game).
No matter how vigorously the family ignored the rumbly grumbly sounds, they did not stop. They did not stop until…
The bear woke up and things got very noisy, indeed.
So, the family contacted the BEAR League. A non profit dedicated to helping people coexist peacefully with bears as we continue the push into their habitat.
According to this post on the league’s Facebook page, members decided to “un-invite” the bear from under the home, so they began offending it. Being territorial in ways designed by experts (OK, I can’t prove that) to make the bear feel…insecure. Self-doubting.
I know. It’s insidious, but it worked.
Out of the crawl space came one giant bear.
One giant mama bear and four little cubs!
Said the bears, “We tried many crawl spaces before this one, but some were too large, others too small, but this one?”
Said mama bear wistfully looking over her shoulder as she disappeared into the wood, “Oh, it was just right.”