Bears get paws on the honey in UK wildlife park escape

LONDON - Two young bears escaped from their enclosure at a UK wildlife park and devoured a week’s worth of food store honey before falling asleep, the attraction said on June 24.

Siblings Mish and Lucy, both aged four, got out of their enclosure at Wildwood Devon in south-western England on June 23 afternoon.

The pair made a beeline for their food store where they scoffed snacks including the seven-day supply of honey, a park statement said.

The bears “posed no threat to the public at any point” although visitors on site were escorted to a secure building as a precaution.

During the hour-long drama, the bears were “continuously monitored both on the ground and via closed-circuit television footage” until they were returned to their enclosure by keepers and promptly “fell asleep”, Wildwood added.

Police attended the scene and an investigation was under way to determine how the animals managed to break out, it said.

The park spread across 160 hectares of gardens and woodland is home to an array of wildlife including brown bears, wolves and arctic foxes.

Mish and Lucy were taken in by Wildwood in 2021 after being abandoned by their mother in a snowdrift in the Albanian mountains.

Several attempts were made to reintroduce the cubs into the wild, but it became clear to conservationists that they could not survive on their own. AFP