Russian Bears Raiding Graveyards

Animals treating cemeteries 'like refrigerators'
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 27, 2010 2:04 AM CDT
Russian Bears Raiding Graveyards
"You have to remember that bears are natural scavengers," a World Wildlife Fund Russia official says.   (Shutter Stock)

You can't play dead any better than by being a corpse buried in a coffin, but that isn't enough to save some Russians from bear attacks. Hungry bears have been raiding Russian cemeteries and eating bodies, behavior that some officials say has been caused by a shortage of the bears' usual food after a particularly scorching summer.

Some experts, however, say the bears have plenty of food and they are raiding cemeteries out of laziness, treating the graveyards as big "refrigerators." In a region near the Arctic Circle, one bear learned how to open a coffin and "then taught the others," a World Wildlife Fund official tells the Guardian. "They are pretty quick learners," she added.
(More Russia stories.)

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