From Snopes, it’s the tale of a fully grown bear that deliberately tore a plastic cover off an electrical box and then bit into the wires, instantly electrocuting itself. My question is, do bears normally chew on non-food items like that? I know they can perpetrate quite a bit of property damage in search of food, but there’s nothing to indicate there was any food near the electrical box. Are there any other cases of bears biting things just for the hell of it?
Or was he just despondent over the loss of BooBoo?
I wondered that myself. My first idea would be that bears aren’t stupid, and it would have been able to tell that the box wasn’t natural. It may have been it’s experience that messing around with human-stuff occasionally got it food, so why not give it a shot?
My only other idea is that perhaps the wire was coated in some edible oil to run it through the conduit.
Some animals do more than just the usual Eat, Poop, Sex routine. They like to play. They’re curious. Or maybe the writing just translated into something offensive in “bearscript”
. . . for a shocking good time! ::rimshot:: [sub]Thanks! I’m here all week. Please tip the waitresses![/sub]
There were a few reports of underwater cables attracting sharks through their electroreceptors–I think some of which were verified. Like the others have said it was probably just a matter of curiosity.
Tripler
Wires are not like paint chips. The blue does not taste better than the red.
That’s a distinct possibility. While there are commercial wax-based pulling lubricants, I have seen electricians use lard. It’s cheap and slippery, so why not? They probably won’t be the next guy to work on it and discover rancid lard. :dubious:
Why would a dog chew on an obviously plastic bone? Or any non-food chew toy? Why are owners of rabbits and guinea pigs told not to let their animals run around a room that has unprotected electric cords?
I used to work for a company that did explosives and munitions testing. As part of our data collection, we used high speed cameras to record the events. The cameras were pretty expensive, so we’d set them up right before the shot. However, the lines that provided power and remotely turned the camera on (usually triggered by a “break” or “make” grid, which was placed right before the field-of-view) were run (laid out) the day before.
On numerous occasions, cattle had wandered onto the site during the night, and completely chewed through all the cables! This happened often enough that we would either scare them all away before we left for the night, or not lay out the lines until morning.
There were numerous theories, but the most widely accepted (amongst about 25 workers) was that the cattle liked the way the plastic felt on their gums. That may or may not be true, but I once caught a cow chewing on one when we arrived on site. I hopped out of my truck, and started chasing it away. It was pretty funny, the cow wouldn’t let go of the cable, and kept runnining with it in its mouth.
Not bears, and not any voltage in the lines to cause electrocution, but cattle do sometimes chew on non-food items.
Bears are extremely curious animals, and probably the most generally intelligent non-primate land mammal. They’ve been known to reguarly spring traps and perform other feats of mechanical manipulation. (Many so-called bear attacks–in which no one is hurt–are out of a combination of foraging for food and curiousity.)
A bear isn’t going to have any clue about the hazards of an electrical wire, though, and like other animals (dogs, pigs, et cetera) will tend to explore new things by smelling, tasting, and exploratively biting them.
Might bee that the bear heard a mechanical fault in the electrical box that sounded like bees.
I’ve thown away several extention cords that were chewed by cattle.
Who knows what they are thinking.
We once had a dog that wouldn’t poop in the yard.
He would go in the road ditch or out in the weeds.
Now if I could figure that one out you’d be talking to a millionaire.
Sometimes bees make nests in electrical boxes too. We recently had the cable company come to wire our neighborhood, and chaos ensued when one of the utility boxes they needed to open was full of 'em. Ouch.
Some dogs are very, um, anal (heh) about where they’ll go. Mine will only go in the two corners of our fenced yard that are as far away from the house as possible. I’m sure if the yard were not fenced, they would go somewhere off the property, simply because they want to keep their own territory clean.
Cats like the chemical residue that’s left after manufacture on some plastic bags, which is why some cats will roll on a plastic grocery bag and lick it.
Couldn’t the same thing be applicable to bears and cattle? Might there be something that they can sense in the plastic coating?
Hm, I never thought of all that. I just assumed that a bear would give the wires a few sniffs, classify it as Not-food, and wander away. I hadn’t heard they sometimes grease the wires with lard. I know domesticated animals like to chew on stuff, but I thought it was because they were bored and had their sharper survival instincts bred out of them.
Coz if you let the bunnies have free run you’ll end up being passed from your broadband company to your phone company as each blames the other for your internet outage until two week, and three engineer visits later, you find that Mrs essell’s adorable rabbits have cut the line running to the router in the most invisble fashion and you’ve gone without playing City of Hero’s for two weeks and your entire supergroup has out leveled you. That why we don’t let bunnies run loose.
If swear the reason they evolved to be so cute is so I don’t wring their dam necks.
