Lake Tahoe terrorized by Hank the Tank, a 500-pound bear

This Might 15, 2018, photograph supplied by the Los Angeles Zoo exhibits Ranger a 25-year previous male American black bear on the Los Angeles Zoo. Presently, Hank the Tank, a 500-pound bear, has been breaking into houses within the South Lake Tahoe area.

(Jamie Pham, LA Zoo by way of Related Press

Hank the Tank, a 500-pound bear, has grow to be a worrisome nuisance for residents in South Lake Tahoe, California, after breaking into greater than two dozen houses.

The black bear rummaged for meals, leaving a damaging path. Up to now, hazing the bear with paintballs, beanbags, sirens and tasers hasn’t labored, and Hank has come round repeatedly, trying to find people and their meals.

Hank the Tank’s felony file

Hank has damaged into 28 houses within the Tahoe space since final July. Native residents have filed over 100 police studies.

“It’s simpler to search out leftover pizza than to go within the forest,” mentioned Peter Tira, a spokesman for the California Division of Fish and Wildlife, per The New York Occasions.

“It is a bear that has misplaced all concern of individuals,” Tira mentioned. “It’s a doubtlessly harmful state of affairs.”

A mean black bear weighs 100 to 300 kilos and Hank's bigger dimension will be attributed to his liking for human rubbish, not berries, in response to The Guardian.

Hank The Tank’s newest stunt

On Friday, Hank broke into a house by a small window. The police banged on the exteriors of the house till Hank got here out the again door, in response to a Fb submit by South Lake Tahoe Police Division.

The officers “are educated to make use of deterrents akin to loud sirens, dry-firing their tasers (makes a clicky-clack noise that the bears hate!), and beanbag rounds to remind bears that it’s not very good to interrupt folks’s property!”

What’s going to occur to Hank The Tank?

The BEAR League, a nonprofit wildlife rescue group, is campaigning towards Hank getting euthanized. As a substitute, they need him taken to a sanctuary.

“It’s extraordinarily irritating to think about with these different choices to save lots of his life that the menace is all the time looming over that you recognize he may very well be killed,” Ann Bryant, govt director of BEAR League mentioned, in response to ABC Information. “We will’t sit again and simply settle for that. It’s not tolerable, you recognize. To kill him goes to ship a message to the general public that the Division of Wildlife doesn’t suppose his life is value something, that he’s only a nuisance. He’s a pest.”

The Division of Wildlife had set traps to catch the bear however these had been eliminated after public outcry. How Hank the Thank will likely be taken off the town streets stays unclear.