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I get a lot of calls from people saying they've seen sun bears,
honey bears, brown bears, other terms.
Actually in Missouri we have what's called the black bear,
eastern black bear.
And it has a lot of different color variations.
Typically it’s all black
and he might have a white blaze on his chest,
but we have some bears that are of a cinnamon phase,
various proportions of black and brown on them,
but they are all of the same genus and species
which is the eastern black bear.
Our bears can grow to four hundred pounds.
I find it interesting how athletic bears are:
they can run as fast as a horse, 35 miles an hour;
they can climb trees.
They're intelligent.
They have an intelligence level on par with primates.
That can also be their downfall though
because they will get into food or garbage
and that's an easy source of food
and they're going to come back to that.
And if there's one thing that I really want to push
is that the worst thing you can do to a bear is either feed it
or let it eat food on your property
like dog food, hog food, garbage.
That bear's goes to turn into a panhandler
and sooner or later he's going to get in trouble
and usually those bears end up being killed
because they become a nuisance.
So that's the one message that we really like to get across
is that a fed bear is a dead bear.