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They have a memory as good as any dog has. Here in Asheville NC these guys are everywhere. They can open your car door, they can open your front door, they can open your sliding glass doors. My house is downtown and we see them almost daily. I introduced firecrackers when they got in my yard, and now they walk around my fenced in yard. They terrorize the neighbors sometimes though. Packages from Amazon or UPS get opened frequently by them. My neighbor's bird feeders get destroyed often, and when they started moving the feeders in at night the bears started finding open windows or unlocked doors coming in and grabbing the bird seed in the house. Since food is easy to come by the mamas raise 3 or 4 cubs that all reach maturity. In the wild the weaker cubs often will die, but here in the city they become viable adults. People have just recently started securing trash cans, but not everyone. They are fun to see, but pretty soon there will be some terrible incidents that are going to happen to people here. Just a week ago a tiny horse was killed and eaten by one of them, which is the second tiny horse killed this year.
Reminds me of one of my favorite stories involving an elephant:
In 1986, Dan Harrison (see picture above) was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Dan approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it.
As carefully and as gently as he could, Dan worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Dan stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Dan never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.
Twenty years later, Dan was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Dan and his son, Dan Jr, were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Dan, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man. Remembering the encounter in 1986, Dan couldn't help wondering if this was the same elephant.
Dan summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Dan's legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.