Yes, this really happened. Just in 2008. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
The internet is a funny place, isn’t it? Sometimes something newsworthy will happen but only get noticed a few years down the road. Such is the case with a Florida man who saved a drugged-up black bear from drowning.
Now, you’d be excused if you saw the words “Florida man” and thought it would be something a little less… heartwarming. The Florida man headline generally is reserved for stories like “Florida Man Arrested for Throwing Alligator Through Drive-Thru Window” or “Florida Man Shoots Alligator that Attacked His Dog in Backyard.” You get the gist. Alligators. Weapons. Those kinds of stories. This, however, is not those. This is a nice story.
Although the story is making the rounds on social media right now, the truth is that it actually happened way back in 2008. When a 375-pound male black bear was spotted multiple times roaming around a residential neighborhood near Alligator Point (of course) a few miles south of Tallahassee, officials decided to shoot it with a tranquilizer dart. Those darts, however, take a while to set in, so the bear had time to run off and into the Gulf of Mexico. But once he was in the water, the dart’s contents began to take effect.
Luckily, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist named Adam Warwick happened to be on hand, and he wasn’t about to watch a bear drown after being shot with a dart. Warwick pulled off his shirt and shoes, jumped in the water, and began to swim to the bear.
“[The bear] started to swim,” Warwick explained on The Early Show. “It started to make the four-mile swim across the harbor. And so, I looked at (a colleague) and I said, ‘I’ve got to go out there and stop him.'”
The rescuer swam ahead of the bear, hoping to herd it back to land instead of letting it reach deeper water.
“I got in front of him, tried to create some splashing and some commotion and tried to get him to go back into shore,” Warwick explained. “But he wasn’t having any of that. The scariest part was probably when he decided — he started looking at me as if he wanted to climb up on me to keep from drowning and, at one point, he reared up on his hind legs, so I’m looking at a six-and-a-half-foot tall bear. Instead of lunging forward, he fell straight back and was submerged for a couple of seconds and, that’s kinda when I moved in.”
Amazingly, Warwick held the bear’s head out of the water while dragging the bear back to shore. “It’s a lot easier to drag a bear in four-feet of water than move him on dry land,” he said.
Which is likely true, but likely not a sentence most people thought they would ever read.
