Bears Caught On Video In Estes Park Pizzaria: Owners Beg Police To Spare Them

ESTES PARK, CO -- A mama black bear and two cubs were caught pawing through pizza dough on overnight surveillance video at Antonio's Real New York Pizza in Estes Park Oct. 8. The restaurant's owners posted the black and white video on Facebook Sunday with a note begging the Estes Park Police Dept. and Colorado Parks and Wildlife not to euthanize the animals.

"All they want is calories with which to hibernate," owner Antonio DeSousa wrote. "We have to come up with a better set of deterrents than creating rules which ensure their euthanization based on the need to eat."

In the video, the mother bear swings open the refrigerator, crawls inside and then and pulls out a tray of pizza dough balls, which one cub strings into his mouth. She then opens a cabinet and pulls out a package the restaurant staff identified as salami.

New rules in Estes Park about keeping dumpsters bear-proof may have spurred the animals to become more creative about obtaining food in the final months before hibernation, the owners speculated. A Wildlife Protection Ordinance passed in 2016 in Estes Park has been enforced to keep wildlife out of the garbage behind the strip in Estes Park.

"The bears ripped a window out of the wall at our drive thru on Moraine Ave! While I don’t advocate feeding wildlife in any way, I believe it would have been much better to have left the old dumpster tops in place because they wouldn’t become desperate enough to break into houses or businesses and the damage in dollars would be much lower," DeSousa posted on Facebook.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife considers bears who have broken into a human building once to be "nuisance wildlife" and often don't get a second chance.

"A bear may be destroyed after or during one nuisance incident if CPW determines that the bear’s behavior will not be altered by translocation," the CPW Human Bear Conflicts report states.

Estes Park police have answered 170 bear-related incident calls so far this year, according to the Estes Park Trail Gazette. In one instance of suspected poaching in August, CPW has offered a reward for information related to the deaths of two black bears found shot in Estes Park.

Larimer Co. rangers have reported more "habituated" bear sightings of black bears recently. A sow and two cubs were shot in June at a campground after they seemed comfortable among people and did not run away after being "hazed" by dogs and loud noises. Larimer Co. rangers said they would be revamping policies with CPW to develop a better policy to deal with bears in populated areas.

Image: Courtesy Colorado Parks and Wildlife