Michigan wildlife officials recently freed a black bear who had spent two full years wearing a plastic barrel lid around his neck. The bear is somehow fine.
Dubbed a minor miracle by state bear specialist Cody Norton, the bear was first spotted as a cub back in 2023 via trail cam. By that point, he was already accessorized with what officials suspect is the lid from a bait barrel that wasn’t properly modified, which is kind of like giving a child a toy filled with choking hazards.
He managed to survive, eat, grow, and evade humans with a big blue plastic disc around his neck. When he resurfaced on camera this past May, still rocking the lid, really owning it, making all the other bears think having a blue plastic disc permanently affixed to your neck is super cool, that’s when the Department of Natural Resources made its move.
Department officials set up a cylindrical trap, which is nonlethal and delivers no pain to whatever creature gets trapped in it. They gave it a tranquilizer injection and then performed some swift outdoor surgery to remove the lid, all of which transpired on June 3.
Within 10 minutes, the bear was free, a little groggy, and a little goofy looking now that in the absence of a large plastic lid, as he had a giant bald patch around his neck, but you have to imagine he was a little bit grateful even if he did look like a doofus now.
Then, as all videos of animals being rescued by humans and, the bear got up and walked away without so much as a thank you, but probably feeling free without having to wear a plastic version of that stupid-looking 16th-century neck ruffle thing that made European nobles look like they were wearing accordions around their necks.
The neck had some scarring but surprisingly, the bear was otherwise in great shape, weighing in at around 110 pounds, which is well within the normal range for a two-year-old bear.
The bear is probably going to have to relearn how to live without a big plastic disc around its neck, as wildlife biologist Angela Kujawa thinks the lid forced the bear to adjust how it rested, probably making him lie down on his back or side more often than a bear normally would. That bear just unlocked a whole new world of rest.
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