MOUNT JUDEA, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas officers shot and killed a male black bear that they consider fatally mauled a 60-year-old Missouri man final week at his campsite within the Ozark Nationwide Forest, authorities mentioned Monday.
The physique of Max Thomas of Springfield, Missouri, was found Thursday a number of yards outdoors the Sam’s Throne campground in northwest Arkansas, Newton County Sheriff Glenn Wheeler mentioned.
A deputy had gone to the campground after the person’s son reported he had not heard from his father, who had despatched his household photos of a black bear in his camp Tuesday morning, Wheeler mentioned. The deputy discovered proof of a battle and harm, together with drag marks from the campground into the woods, the sheriff mentioned.
“We consider he was within the means of breaking down his camp when the assault occurred,” Wheeler mentioned.
The state medical expert’s workplace decided the person’s demise to be an “animal mauling.”
On Sunday, a bear was caught on a path digital camera close to the campground that seemed to be the identical animal photographed by the sufferer and encountered by one other man at a roadside overlook within the space, Wheeler mentioned.
Native hunters and hounds have been introduced into the world and rapidly tracked the bear, which was killed and transported to Little Rock, the place authorities will receive DNA samples to verify it’s the bear who fatally attacked the person.
“We knew the bear within the photographs was a male and this one is simply too,” Wheeler mentioned in a press launch. “It matches the scale of the photographed bear and has the identical facial colorations. To not point out it was again in the identical space the place the assault occurred.”
It’s the second deadly bear assault in Arkansas in current weeks. In September, a 72-year-old man died after being attacked by a bear in close by Franklin County, based on authorities with the Arkansas Sport and Fish Fee.
Regardless of the current assaults, Don White Jr., a big mammal ecologist on the College of Arkansas at Monticello, mentioned deadly bear assaults in Arkansas are “exceedingly uncommon.”
The final confirmed deadly bear assault in Arkansas was in 1892, mentioned Keith Stephens, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Sport and Fish Fee.
Though black bears have been frequent in Arkansas earlier than European settlement, the numbers dwindled to fewer than 50 by the Nineteen Thirties, White mentioned. These numbers have continued to climb because the reintroduction of lots of of black bears into the Ouachita and Ozark mountains of Arkansas within the Fifties and Sixties, with an estimated 5,000 black bears within the state now, though White mentioned that determine is troublesome to pinpoint.
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