By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-04-05 19:46:34 | Updated at 2025-04-06 13:03:29
17 hours ago
Shocking images have emerged of a two-legged black bear roaming in the mountains of West Virginia.
Kirk Price, an experienced outdoorsman in the state, captured the bear walking around on its only two legs with a trail camera he set up.
Price, who shared several videos of the bear last September, said the area it was traversing 'has some of the steepest terrain in the Appalachian mountains' yet observed that it had 'no problem getting around'.
Price told USA Today that he believed the bear is a male and approximately eight years old.
He added that he first found out about the bear in 2018, saying the animal was 'smaller then and has almost doubled in size since originally spotted'.
'At that point he was already walking around by himself and was not a cub,' he explained. 'A cub usually stays with their mother until close to two years old.'
Price said he has only seen the bear once in person, but he and several others have seen it numerous times over the years from photos and videos taken from his trail camera.
'He's very (elusive) and is rarely spotted in person,' Price said. 'He lives in the mountains. Believe it or not he moves around quite a bit. He has roughly a five-mile radius.'
Kirk Price's trail camera has captured the bear on numerous occasions in the wild
Price described his one-and-only encounter with the two-legged bear in a YouTube video from 2022.
He explained that he had been training his dogs to catch bears. In many states, this is illegal, but in West Virginia, hunters can train their dogs year round.
Training their dogs involves driving around until they get the scent of bear. The hunter than lets them loose so they can chase the bear up a tree.
When a bear is successfully 'treed', the hunter gathers up his dogs and goes to find the next target. If it had been hunting season, the hunter would then tie up his dogs before shooting the bear up in the tree.
Price said that one day while he was training his many hounds, they came up on a bear. He said that he quickly got a notification on his GPS indicating that the bear was treed.
But when he caught up to his dogs, he saw something unbelievable.
'I start making my way up the hill to where the bear is and as I get closer I can tell just by the sound of it that the bear is on the ground,' he said in the video.
'I get up to it and I cannot believe what I see. There is a bear on its hind legs running around like a sasquatch. It was bizarre,' he added, as footage played of the dogs surrounding the defenseless animal.
Adult black bears, which live throughout most of North America, can typically run about 30 to 35 miles per hour and are excellent tree climbers (Pictured: A black bear roaming around Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming)
Price 'firmly believes' that the bear was born with only two legs and didn't have an accident at the hands of a hunter or another animal.
'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,' he said.
There was another two-legged black bear named Pedals spotted many times in New Jersey before he was killed during a hunt in 2016.
Adult black bears, which live throughout most of North America, can typically run about 30 to 35 miles per hour and are excellent tree climbers.
Price said that while he hunts and eats bears regularly, he also believes in conservation and loves seeing bears 'thrive on the landscape'.
'This particular bear is special, and I would never purposely hunt him,' Price said.
