Name: If this survives for an hour, it passes the Bear Test.
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T17:31:08.000Z
Duration: 5 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When my plane landed here, the flight attendant welcomed everyone to West Yellowstone, Montana and added, don't feed the bears.

There's a lot of reminders not to do that.

Adverbs of degree

The whole of Yellowstone park, which starts just a couple hundred metres that way, is bear country.

And hikers and campers heading from this town into the wilderness will bring food with them.

If the wind's in the right direction, then a bear can smell that food miles away.

Which isn't great for the humans, who do not want a hungry grizzly bear that weighs a third of a ton of rummaging through and destroying their campsite.

Bears are relatively smart creatures and if one of them makes the connection between humans and easily available food, it might start seeking out campsites and homes.

in that case it might have to be euthanized, killed not just for human safety, but

because it might pass that behaviour along to its cubs and along to their cubs and suddenly the wilderness isn't so wild anymore.

There are rules for people going into the park and one of them involves keeping all your food in bear resistant containers, a bit like these trash cans.

So problem number two, how do you certify that a container is actually bear resistant?

Here at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Centre, they're trying to solve both those problems in one go.

Rather than euthanizing a bear that's a bit too interested in picnic baskets, it can get moved here just outside the park where it might get a new job testing containers.

On average, our bears test around 60 products per season, which runs from April 1 to October 1.

Seems like everybody wants to make a bear resistant cooler these days.

So then we have the trash cans, something you'd roll out to the end of your driveway.

Some metal products even get tested here.

We want those products to pass the test so that out in the field a bear doesn't get that food reward and moves on, continues back into the woods where they belong.

Peanut butter and honey as a close second.

And then we either put dried dog kibble or dog treats inside.

Quite often we put a dummy container in to give those bears a food reward every once in a while.

If they were to not be able to get into a product 20 products in a row, why perhaps would they try to get in that 21st time?

So let them remember that there's a lot of goodies inside and they need to put that effort into trying to get in.

Lots of double checks, security, you know, radio calls.

So obviously I asked to put a camera inside one of the dummy trash cans, one of the trash cans that the bears would definitely get into.

I didn't think the team here would let me, but

they said yes immediately and in hindsight, of course they said yes.

The bears are literally being given a load of plastic and metal to rip apart in the hope of reaching the food inside.

A camera in a protective case is not going to make any difference to them.

The bear's favorite method, at least with the trash can we find is the CPR method.

And a lot of times they separate the lid from the body with coolers.

They're gonna use their teeth to tear the plastic apart.

And then the styrofoam and then the next layer and then it's a cleanup on aisle four.

There is a centuries long history of bears being mistreated for entertainment and I do not want to be part of that.

This place has to survive as a non profit and as a tourist attraction.

But that can't mean putting the bears welfare at risk.

Fortunately, the team here are very clear that they don't want that to happen either.

We would never want to put the bears at risk.

These are all rescued bears that came from the wild.

We don't call out to the bears, we don't talk to the bears.

We want them to remain as wild as possible.

We also ask the public to not call out to the bears.

The bear habitat is about an acre in size.

We do have two ponds, a waterfall and lots of trees and rocks and logs.

We stock the pond with fish all summer long.

The food that's hidden out into the bear habitat in front of the public is just an enrichment to keep them active, to snack, let them do their natural behaviors like they would in the wild.

It turns out that it's really difficult to make a container that humans will want to use and can use, but

Yesterday I tried to use one of those bear resistant trash cans and it had been jammed shut by someone that apparently couldn't figure it out and just shoved their garbage in the latch.

Because there's an old quote allegedly from some park Ranger in the 1980s.

I couldn't find the original source that says there's a considerable overlap between the brain power of the most intelligent bears and the least intelligent tourists.

60 minutes of contact time, quarter inch hole or larger is a fail.

We always say bear resistant because we feel that if you give a bear an unlimited amount of time, they'll get in most everything.

No guarantees those bears are going to come around and try to get that easy meal each and every time.

We're trying to educate the visitors to not make the same mistakes that got most of our bears here in the first place.

More and more bears are staying out of trouble in the wild.

Oh, yeah, no, that's a bear with a GoPro.

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If this survives for an hour, it passes the Bear Test.

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