There was a very rare black bear attack on a human being on Monday in Tuolumne County, but the 24-year-old jogger who suffered the attack has since reportedly been released from the hospital.
While it’s extremely rare for a California black bear to attack a person, we’ve now seen a few examples of this within the last nine months. The first was back in November 2023, when a 71-year-old woman was fatally mauled by a black bear in Sierra County’s Downieville, and the bear had apparently been stalking her for months. Last month, a black bear in Yosemite National Park charged at a man and ripped his clothing.
Now we have another of these attacks, as a black bear attacked a 24-year-old jogger this past Monday at around 5 pm in the Tuolumne County community of Long Barn, according to SFGate. While that report notes the man is in stable condition, other media reports indicate he’s already been released from the hospital.
As Sacramento’s KOVR explains, the unidentified 24-year-old man was on a run when he encountered a bear cub. The mother bear emerged from the trees and began to chase the jogger. She attacked him and pushed him into a ditch, giving him several scrapes and gouges. (Ironically, one of the gouges was on his thigh, “right where the man has a tattoo of a bear” according to KOVR.) He smacked the bear with a stick and managed to get away, but only briefly.
"I see this young man running down the road and a bear literally chasing and biting at him, and his shirt flapping in the wind,” neighbor Heather Silfies told KOVR. “It was just shredded and he didn't have one of his shoes on all the way, so he's literally running with the shoe not on.”
The man then jumped onto the top of Silfies’s SUV. "The young man is standing on the roof of our Escalade," she continued. "The bear is standing at the Escalade and she's trying to climb up. So she has her foot on the running board and she's literally jumping up at him, wanting to get on the roof, just wanting to attack him."
The bear was successfully chased off, and per People magazine, the unnamed man was treated at Adventist Health in Sonora. But Silfies told KOVR that the man has since come back to their home to thank her family, so it sounds like he’s been released.
“That's not normal bear behavior to attack a person,” Department of Fish and Wildlife captain Patrick Foy told the local paper Union Democrat. “It’s very much not normal behavior for a bear. This bear has showed unusual aggression towards a human. The bear is still out in the community. We haven’t caught it. We don’t know if we will catch this one. There's a reduced chance because this is not a bear that's habituated to people and people sources of food.”
And Foy added, “If we get a bear in the trap and we get a DNA profile of the bear in the trap, if that bear matches the DNA samples we collected from the attack, that bear will be euthanized.”
Image: American black bear (Ursus americanus) cub. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee )Getty Images)
