The grizzly bear section of Minnesota Zoo has been temporarily closed to the public after one of its inhabitants cracked the glass enclosure with a 50lb rock.
Robin Ficker, a zoo-goer who saw the bear break the glass with a rock, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that “while many people were standing there, he slammed it against the glass several times”. The bear managed to break through one layer of the five-layer glass.
But Tony Fisher, director of animal collections at the zoo on the outskirts of Minneapolis, said it was much more playful than that: “He wasn’t smashing it against the glass, he was moving it against the glass, rolling it against the glass. He does that with sticks and fish and whatever he has.”
He added: “The bear wasn’t being aggressive. The bear was just playing with a rock.”
They suspect the bear was a roughly 800lb male named Kenai, one of three bears at the zoo orphaned in Alaska in 2006. According to Fisher, he “loves to play” and “he wrestles with the other male out there quite a bit”.
The bears have never broken through the glass panel before and everything else in the exhibit is “pretty indestructible”, according to Fisher. All of the rocks are supposed to be sealed to the ground with concrete.
“We thought we had all the rocks concreted into place but they found one and they made use of it,” Fisher said.
The glass Kenai scratched is two and a half inches thick and has five layers. He only broke through one of the layers. “There was at no time any risk of the bear getting out or any people being in danger,” Fisher said. “The glass is designed to break that way if it’s compromised and that’s exactly what it did.”
The bears were immediately called back into a holding area after the incident, something they are trained to do if there’s a thunderstorm or tornado warning or, in this case, a risk to the exhibit. They will be held there until a new barrier can be built. A temporary barrier should be ready in a week or two, according to Fisher, but a permanent fixture might take several months.
