A teenager who pushed a bear off a wall to rescue her dogs has said it “didn’t register” that it was a bear, and she only realised the feat after she ran inside.
“Honestly, I did not know it was a bear until right after I pushed it. It didn’t register in my head that it was a bear,” the 17-year-old, Hailey Morincio, told ABC7.
“I was like, ‘It’s an animal, and it’s taking my child’, I pushed the bear, and then I was like ‘Oh my god, I just pushed a bear.’ Who in their right mind pushes a bear?”
The video, which was widely viewed on TikTok, shows the bear sitting on the wall with her cubs, clawing at one of Hailey’s dogs outside her home in California.
The teenager runs towards the bear and knocks it off, and the cubs run away. Before the bear can get back up, Hailey grabs her dogs and runs away to safety.
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“I didn’t have much time to think,” she added in an interview with CBS Los Angeles. “I run over to the bear and the first thing I think to do is to push the bear off the ledge it’s standing on, and so it will hopefully release my dog, and somehow, thank God, it works.”
“Honestly the only thing I had in mind was to protect my dogs and that’s what I did.”
In a video on her TikTok account, Hailey said it is “actually really normal” for the bears to come down from the mountains in the summer.
“This is our garden area and the dogs start barking, and I just thought they were barking at dogs, because they always bark at dogs and squirrels or whatever. I go to tell them to stop and when I go over there to see what they’re barking at, I’m like ‘that’s a funny-looking dog’. By the time I get there, the bear is literally picking up one of my dogs,” Hailey added.
“I go over to the bear, I look it in the eyes, and the first thing I think to do is push it. Push a bear, push an apex predator. To be honest, I don’t think I pushed her that hard. I just pushed her enough to make her lose her balance, so she dropped my dog and I ran out of there. I grabbed my other dog, I sprained my finger and scraped my knee, but we’re all OK,” she said.
“She just shoved that bear like it was a stuffed animal,” one commenter wrote.
Hailey’s cousin Brenda shared the video on TikTok on Memorial Day, 31 May. It has been viewed more than 68 million times so far.
