An Arms Race with Bears

Last year we moved to a new house, which is surrounded by a lot of trees. One day in springtime, our neighbor texted me picture of a bear behind his fence. The next day I saw that our garbage can was tipped over and open. But there was no garbage strewn around it, so I figured maybe it had blown over in the wind. But the day after that, my daughter pointed out a pile of garbage some distance away, near the trees. So I checked the security camera, and sure enough, a bear had gotten into the trash. It just decided to drag all the bags away before ripping them open and making a huge mess.

Round one was after dark, so the camera footage isn't great, but here are some shots from the visit #2:

 

Well that wasn't going to work. The garbage collection folks said they didn't have any bear-proof cans, but that we could install a lock. So I found something that looked good and installed it. (But not before the bears visited us again.) The good wildebeests (get it? "gnus"? news?) was that the locks were indeed beyond the bears' ability to open. (You need fingers to undo the carabiner.)

The bad wildebeests was that the lids themselves were flimsy enough for the bears to pull back. It took them a lot of effort, but after flipping the cans over and climbing on top of them, they were able to get food waste out and make a huge mess.

Since the bendiness of the lid wasn't that much, I hypothesized that maybe I didn't need a bunch more locks; maybe just a bungee cord across the front would make it no longer worth their time. Here's what the bears thought:

This went on for more than 10 minutes.

So I broke down and bought four more locks, for the corners of the two cans. And guess what? The bears haven't even bothered coming back. Maybe the locks I had made things not worth their trouble after all. But for the rest of my life I'll have to unlock three carabiners every time I take out the trash. So I'm not really sure whether I won the arms race, or whether the joke is on me.