A man from Mission, B.C., is still shaken after rescuing his girlfriend and dogs from a black bear attack.
“I’ll put myself in the way of danger any day for her,” Dan Flasch told CTV Vancouver. “I love her very much.”
Flasch and his girlfriend were doing laundry on the night of Oct. 21 when his girlfriend went to let their dogs, Chip and Peanut, outside. Flasch said he first heard his dogs yelp. Then, his girlfriend screamed.
“I’ve never heard a woman scream that way in my life, ever,” he recalled.
Although he could hear his girlfriend, he couldn’t see her behind the full-sized black bear.
“The bear had her front paws literally on the front step, just taking up the whole doorway,” Flasch said.
He remembered thinking, “Just punch him in the nose. What else am I going to do?”
“I didn’t have anything near me to grab, I just threw a punch at her,” Flasch said. “I had to get them away somehow.”
He chased the bear down the street before helping his girlfriend back into the house. That’s when she told him the bear had knocked her down, scratched her, and bit her in the back.
The encounter might have been worse if Flasch didn’t intervene in time.
“Her house coat [was] just shredded, she didn’t even realize it until later,” Flash said.
Neighbour Glenn Wells, a Mission, B.C. resident, told CTV Vancouver he saw the mother bear and her cubs in the backyard. He tried to divert them with bear bangers.
“They just looked at me as I was doing this whole thing, and I threw [the bear banger] at [the bear], and it blew up and [the bears] just sat there. They didn’t care,” Wells said.
The mother bear and her two cubs were later found by conservation officers. When one officer approached the bears, the mother attacked, biting the officer in the leg.
The officer was taken to hospital and received stitches. The adult bear and her two cubs were all killed.
With files from CTV Vancouver and The Canadian Press
