credit – Kirk Price, InstagramA black bear born without front legs has been sighted more or less thriving in the mountains of West Virginia.
Though not unheard of, it’s wild to be able to see the animal’s natural movement, having been transformed, by consequence of his birth, from a quadrupedal animal to a bipedal animal like us.
“The area he’s in has some of the steepest terrain in the Appalachian mountains,” hunter and outdoor writer Kirk Price wrote on Instagram. “He has no problem getting around.”
Price posted a video on his YouTube channel in 2022 explaining he had been aware that the bear was in the area, and had seen still photos of it from as far back as 2018, but the video was him explaining a face-to-face encounter he had with the animal which he described as “just the toughest, baddest son-of-a-gun.”
He also said that there were no signs the “son-of-a-gun” was deadly underfed and that the encounter ended with the bear running up a steep hillside on his two hind legs like it was no bother.
The most recent sightings must make this particular bear, according to Price’s estimation, around 8 years old. Black bear cubs, he said, stay with their moms for 2 years. He hadn’t been with his mother in 2018 in the trail camera photos, but he wasn’t particularly large then, making a 2015/2016 birth year plausible.
Speaking with USA Today, Price said he had been asked if traps could have been the cause of the bear’s disability, and added that the “clean nubs” where his forearms should be are not at all the result one would see if the bear had fallen prey to such a device.
Also, the bear has never been seen with one arm, which would then suggest that if it were a trap that disfigured him, he would have had to have lost both arms to traps either simultaneously, or one after the other over a very short time span, while also surviving the subsequent injury and infection.
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Bear traps are not used by hunters today, and are not only illegal, but the kind of thing most hunters would abhor.
“I firmly believe he was born that way and has overcome all odds. That’s what the focus should be on. This bear is truly amazing,” Price told the news outlet.
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The Instagram comments were filled equally with people suggesting such an animal led to the myth of Bigfoot, and jokes that the Democrats had taken away his Second Amendment Rights…
WATCH the trail cam footage below…
SHARE This Incredible Animal Living Large In West Virginia…
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