Name: 'Completely emaciated': The tragic, traumatic fate of Tahoe's Safeway Bear
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'Completely emaciated': The tragic, traumatic fate of Tahoe's Safeway Bear

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Remember the Safeway Bear? Last summer, at the height of Tahoe’s over-touristed pandemic, a 500-pound black bear in Lake Tahoe discovered the grocery store. The story sounds like the beginning of a joke: “So a bear walks into a grocery store …”California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials captured the notorious bear and released him into the wild, far away from grocery stores and Lake Tahoe.&nbsp;This week, officials revealed the fate of Safeway Bear. His story ends in tragedy.Safeway Bear . California Fish and Wildlife officials estimated he was 16 or 18 years old, and at that age, he was ready for easier access to food. One August night in 2020, he approached the grocery store at Kings Beach, on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. To the bear’s surprise, the sliding glass doors suddenly opened wide. He walked right in and helped himself to the produce section. Someone inside the store recorded the whole event on their phone, and this being the age of animal memes, .He also frequented a convenience store at a nearby gas station. There, a security camera filmed the bear in the candy aisle, gorging on sweets.The Safeway Bear also attended a birthday party at a picnic area across the street from Kings Beach. He was not invited, but that didn’t stop him from sitting down at the picnic table and eating the birthday cake.Although these stories are funny, they are not good news for the bear. A bear who displays this type of bold action around humans is no longer safe. Sooner or later, an encounter will turn ugly, and that always, always ends badly for the bear.A few months ago, hungry for food, and when the vacationers came home, one of them shot it several times in the head. More often, if a bear is aggressive toward humans, Fish and Wildlife will intervene.But the Safeway Bear hadn’t displayed any aggression. He was just hungry, old and stubborn. So when Fish and Wildlife trapped him in late summer 2020, they decided not to euthanize him. Instead, they gave him a second chance at a good life, releasing him into the wild at an undisclosed location in El Dorado County.Kevin Thomas, manager of the North Central Region for Fish and Wildlife, told me at the time that bear releases typically go pretty quickly: The door opens and the bear dashes out for the woods. But Safeway Bear was different. He was slow to get out and he didn’t really want to leave.“It looked at us. We kept making noises to get it out, and it kept looking at us and looking at us,” Thomas told me last year. Finally, after a solid 10 minutes, the bear scampered into the woods when officials hazed him with bean bag pellets.The bear had a GPS collar so wildlife officials could track his movement and activity. Tahoe bears are known for their dependence on human food. Thomas and his team hoped that, by releasing Safeway Bear into the wild, far away from Tahoe, he would change his behavior and start to live off natural sources of food.“We haven’t released a whole lot of bears like this recently,” Thomas told me last year, several weeks after they had released Safeway Bear. “That gave us a good opportunity to look at what would happen if a bear that age was released and then what would happen. Is it able to refind its wild roots, so to speak? And go back to being what a normal bear would be outside of the basin?”In Tahoe, bears essentially live in an urban environment. This way of life has been passed down from mother to cub, for generations. Here, bears scavenge overflowing dumpsters. Just putting a trash can outside in the morning is easy bait; Tahoe bears know garbage day. If you even leave a snack in your car, beware.I grew up in Tahoe and have endless bear stories. Once, I pulled into my driveway on the West Shore to see all four doors of my brother’s car swung open and the seats rummaged through. At first, I thought it was a thief looking for some cash. Then I realized, of course, a bear had just been sniffing out the dog food that was left in the seat cracks.I’ve known bears to rip doors off their hinges to enter empty homes. They’ll also claw through plywood that’s nailed over windows. We started putting a tarp over our freezer in our garage because bears know what they look like. They also know how to open a refrigerator door. And once they’re inside a home, their nose will lead them right to the pantry.This summer, on a camping trip in Tahoe, I saw a small bear climb up a tree just behind our tent. The mother was nowhere to be seen, and I assumed this bear had just left its mom to fend for itself. Now, it was hanging close to campsites, where food was in abundance, even with the bear boxes and all the signage from state park employees about keeping food secured. My dog barked at the bear and this time, it scampered off. But we were probably the only campers relieved to see the bear run into the forest, away from humans.A little while later, a father and his young daughter came to our campsite and asked if we’d seen the teddy bear. That’s actually what they called the bear.Fish and Wildlife officials found an abandoned GPS tracking collar last spring in the Stanislaus National Forest, south of Lake Tahoe. They assumed the collar was left behind by the Safeway Bear, and they hoped for the best-case scenario: That the bear had successfully transitioned to a natural diet and had lost weight, adjusting to a more normal size for a black bear.That’s not what was likely happening though. The reality is much more traumatic.According to , in August, officials responded to calls reporting that a large black bear was shot and killed in a campground in Alpine County. A family with small children was camping when the bear repeatedly approached their campsite during the evening and late into the night. Officials noted that the campsite was clean, and that the family had done the right things to secure their food and trash.But the bear kept coming to the campsite, and, fearing for their safety, the family shot and killed the bear. They called to report the shooting to wildlife officials, who deemed the shooting “justified.”Fish and Wildlife officials immediately recognized the bear by the tag in its ear, identifying it as the Kings Beach Safeway Bear. “The bear — once weighing more than 500 pounds — was a shell of its former self, completely emaciated, its teeth rotten,” the report says.One biologist for California Fish and Wildlife called the shooting “the most humane outcome for this bear.”More Lake Tahoe News———For weekly updates, interviews and profiles from a Tahoe insider, sign up for our Tahoe newsletter .

Remember the Safeway Bear? Last summer, at the height of Tahoe’s over-touristed pandemic, a 500-pound black bear in Lake Tahoe discovered the grocery store. The story sounds like the beginning of a joke: “So a bear walks into a grocery store …”California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials captured the notorious bear and released him into the wild, far away from grocery stores and Lake Tahoe.&nbsp;This week, officials revealed the fate of Safeway Bear. His story ends in tragedy.Safeway Bear . California Fish and Wildlife officials estimated he was 16 or 18 years old, and at that age,...

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Journalist, writer. Contributing editor at @sfgate covering Lake Tahoe. Likes: small towns, big ideas, tall trees.

Julie Brown

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'Completely emaciated': The tragic, traumatic fate of Tahoe's Safeway Bear

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