fridge was open<\/a>, and food was strewn across the floor. His wife called the police.<\/p>\nBreak-ins have now been reported at five locations in the north-eastern town of Shizukuishi, leading officials to suspect one bear may be a repeat offender. They have set up box traps, installed electric fences around repeatedly targeted houses and deployed patrols to warn people about the bear.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s unusual for a bear to break into the same place multiple times,\u201d said Shiho Chida, a bear specialist with the nature division in Iwate prefecture, where the town lies. \u201cIt\u2019s possible this is the same animal, so we want to capture it as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
So far, a bear has been caught breaking into buildings on a farm in the area four times over the past couple of weeks, helping itself to milk-based cattle feed. It was caught on camera attempting to open the sliding door of a farmhouse in the dead of night, but ran away after the farmer shone a light on it and shouted loudly.<\/p>\n
In the hope of discouraging the unwanted intruder, the farmer has taken to spreading a homemade anti-bear mixture containing Japanese mustard around entranceways.<\/p>\n
On Friday last week, another local resident came home from shopping to find a bear inside his house near the room where his elderly father was sleeping. The animal ran outside when he banged on a nearby door. But it attempted to come back inside, and the man spent about 30 seconds struggling to hold a sliding door shut as the bear stood on its hind legs trying to push its way in. He described the bear as about 1.65 metres tall.<\/p>\n
The following evening a woman discovered a bear going through food in her kitchen, and on Sunday it broke into a Japanese confectionery shop and took doughnuts out of the fridge.<\/p>\n
The bear\u2019s sweet tooth has driven it to break into one house five times, where it has eaten cookies, sugar and karinto, a Japanese sugar-coated sweet made from fried dough.<\/p>\n
Record numbers of bear attacks and fatalities have occurred in Japan in recent years. Experts believe that shrinking populations in rural areas have made it less intimidating<\/a> for bears to come into towns, and that many have now lost their fear of humans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Authorities are searching for a bear that sneaked into the home of an elderly couple and raided their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-526838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}