Bear Pays Visit to Colorado Restaurant, Gets Meal to Go - East Idaho News
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Bear Pays Visit to Colorado Restaurant, Gets Meal to Go

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Getty 061212 BlackBear?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1375442457249iStockphoto/Thinkstock(COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.) — Edelweiss Restaurant in Colorado Springs, Colo., is kept busy with diners who enjoy the large portions of German cuisine.  But for one special patron, only a super-sized serving would do.

When employees arrived to work  on Wednesday morning, they found that one of the restaurant’s dumpsters had been dragged from its normal spot and out into the parking lot.

The restaurant had been vandalized earlier this year and surveillance cameras had been installed, so staffers checked the video and saw that a rather determined bear had visited overnight.

“When we pulled up the video, this bear walks over and just grabs a hold of the dumpster and just drags it away,” Dieter Schnackenberg, the restaurant’s manager, told ABC News Thursday evening.

Edelweiss is located near a wooded area next to a creek bed, so bears have foraged for food in the restaurant’s trash before, but this time was a little different, Schnackenberg said.

“For him to push it around like that was pretty impressive,” he said.

The video opens with a shot of two enormous dumpsters.  The black bear enters the frame and begins to nose one of the enormous wheeled steel trash containers, before moving on to the second one.

The animal gets up onto its hind legs, puts its front paws onto the lid and drags the second dumpster away, right out of the shot.

Schnackenberg said his employees found the bin about 60 feet away from its original spot.  It had been tipped over, and the contents were scattered around.

The bear came back again overnight on Wednesday, and video again showed it dragging away a full dumpster.

From now on, Schnackenberg said, the dumpsters will be chained shut to deter the bear.

“The last thing that we want is him getting hurt, and we don’t need people coming here and trying to watch the bear — because he’s a big bear,” he said.  “I bet he’s 400 pounds.  I’m sure he could definitely hurt someone.”

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