Bear rampaging through Japanese supermarket for 2 days is lured out with honey, then killed

A bear that rampaged through a Japanese supermarket for two days was lured out with food coated in honey, local officials said. The animal was trapped and later killed on Monday, police said.

Japan has a growing problem with bears, with a record six human fatalities from attacks and more than 9,000 of the animals killed in the previous fiscal year.

In the latest incident, police received an emergency call early Saturday that a bear had wounded a 47-year-old man in a supermarket in Akita, on Japan’s main island of Honshu. Japan Today reported the man, a store employee, was expected to recover.

A gash on the man’s head “will take at least a week to heal once his stitches get removed, according to a doctor,” a police spokesman told AFP.

The supermarket was evacuated with the animal left inside, where it laid waste to the meat department, according to the Asahi Shimbun daily.

Finally early Monday, the bear walked into a trap containing “rice bran, bananas, apples, and bread, all coated with honey,” an Akita official told AFP.

“We prepared two traps, and one of them captured the bear on the backyard side of the supermarket,” he said.

The animal was killed later Monday, Japan Today reported, citing police.

Human-bear interactions on the rise in Japan

Human fatalities from bears in the fiscal year to March 31 included an elderly woman attacked in her garden and a fisherman whose severed head was found by a lake.  A bear attack was also suspected after a college student was found dead on a mountain in northern Japan.

The period had the highest number of deaths since the government started collecting data from 2006 to 2007.

More than 200 other people were involved in incidents with bears.

In the current fiscal year so far, three people have been killed.

Experts told CBS News that as Japan’s population shrinks, humans are leaving rural areas, and bears are moving in.

“Then that area recovered to the forest, so bears have a chance to expand their range,” biologist Koji Yamazaki, from Tokyo University of Agriculture, told CBS News. 

Other factors include climate change affecting the omnivores’ food supply and their hibernation times. This summer tied for Japan’s warmest on record.

In the previous fiscal year, a record 9,097 bears were killed, more than twice that of the previous period, according to the environment ministry.

Local media have reported that authorities are having problems finding enough hunters to shoot the animals, citing Japan’s declining and ageing population.

The country has two types of bears: moon bears and the larger brown bear, which can weigh 1,100 pounds, outrun a human and, in Japan, only lives in the main northern island of Hokkaido.

Last August , hunters killed an elusive brown bear nicknamed “Ninja” in Hokkaido after it attacked at least 66 cows, the Associated Press reported. And, in October 2023, local Japanese officials and media outlets reported that three bears were euthanized after sneaking into a tatami mat factory in the northern part of the country.