I worked in a place that had several apple trees in the parking lot that led to a similar issue. The apples would ferment then drunk squirrels would chase people around sometimes. It was pretty funny unless it happened to you
I regularly see a squirrel (of the European red kind, far more reclusive and shy than their American relatives) frantically licking the varnish of a chair that lives on my balcony. Looks very much like a drug habit, I hope it's not too unhealthy.
Confirms my belief that squirrels are assholes. We have some that urinate on our deck. They also pick and take a single bite out of our tomatoes and lemons, spoiling an entire harvest just before we pick it.
OMG yes. I feed crows on my balcony, giving them a few dozen peanuts every day. I mind less that the squirrels steal them and much more that they fucking pee on the deck railing every time. I’ve taken to leaving a window open and shooting them with a water pistol; that blows their minds.
Supposedly that's how peppers evolved their capsaicin irritant. Discouraged land-bound consumers but encouraged avians who would carry the seeds further.
Pellet gun or a bow sounds like it could seriously hurt the animal, why would you prefer that rather than harmless water? They'll learn after a while to stay away with just water.
I find this reply humorous as it points out the flaw in the above posters thinking.
Having said that, I tend to lean on the side of the other poster in that harming animals should be avoided unless there's a specific reason (such as eating them)
At some point the world isn't kumbaya and the animals will learn when they tend to die or be physically hurt when approaching that activity.
You really don't want to take squirrels to your local butcher. If they don't laugh you out of the shop, there's not nearly enough meat on them to pay them for their time.
Get yourself a good, sharp paring knife or pocket knife and some kitchen shears and you're good to go.
Oh, I’ve no desire to hurt them. Squirrels are living creatures. They’re causing no true harm, and I have no ends that are served well by their deaths. One could argue about whether they aspire to true Personhood as a dog or dolphin or human, but they certainly have their own little bits of Buddha-nature, and that is to be respected.
Thought about it. My neighbors are so close that I worry about using anything other than a water gun, which was pretty ineffective, though they seem to really, really hate water, for some reason.
Yeah, but they're a lot larger than a squirrel. Unless you have squirrels the size of exhaust ports, in which case I need to know how to avoid your neighborhood!
Get a cat. The presence/smell of a cat will do even if they never directly harm a squirrel. The week after my cat passed away, I was shocked at how brazen the local squirrels became. Suddenly they were everywhere around the house.
I worked at a pet store in college. This mother came in with her daughter and they wanted to get a Pet. They weren’t sure what but definitely not a rat, and definitely not a male anything.
I worked with them for about three hours, and at the end sent them home with a male rat. Both delighted as can be.
He was a very social and playful one that I had been planning on taking home.
Yes, if you can stand the smell, and keep them active and socially-engaged, rats make excellent pets. They’re more predator than prey, with all that implies.
I find their body language pretty hard to read and their interaction to be much closer to prey (a rabbit) than predator (a dog or cat), but perhaps that is a lack of experience on my part.
I once thought squirrels were cute. Then I became a condo association president.
I removed squirrel carcasses from all rooftop A/C units, along with the harvested nutshells that they had left behind. I patched the holes they opened into the walls and crevices of the condo apartments.
Finally I helped remove the 40-year-old pecan tree adjacent to one building's slab and which had hosted these pests for decades. The tree was lifting the slab and likely would have broken the foundation.
I have resolved that buildings should never coexist with either large trees (nut-bearing or otherwise) or with rodents.
Two years ago some jackass planted two pecan trees in the condo front yard. This year the pecans are falling and the squirrels have already moved back. The homeowners' association is clueless. The cycle continues.
My parents love to put out bird seed but are in a constant war with the squirrels.
Once, years ago, they went on a long vacation. The squirrels didn't like that the humans weren't setting out the buffet, so they broke into the food storage: a bog-standard rubbermaid style 55-galon outdoor trash can. They chewed right through the lid.
Solution: replace with a bog-standard metal outdoor trash can. After the next vacation, my parents came home to find tooth marks on the lid, signs of an attempted but thwarted break-in. Battle: Humans. War: On-going.
Maybe the mouse keeper will help, a device I created when I was student. It is a motion detector duct taped to a vacuum cleaner. Works very good on mice, perhaps also on squirrels.
Where I used to live there was a pear tree in a dog park, and a huge rabbit problem in the whole city. So every autumn your dog might end up chasing a rabbit around the dog park in the middle of the night.
Various states have pretty strict (including criminal laws) re littering and securing loads on vehicles. Montana does not.
Linked are some examples that mostly apply to vehicles on highways but some apply to trains. Montana doesn't seem to have rules for trains, and even for trucks carrying agricultural produce and fertilizer seem to be exempt from littering laws.
There are also environmental protection laws that may apply.
So this seems like an issue that could be prevented by introducing littering laws / secure loads that apply in other states.
If you read to the last paragraph, the article suggests but does not outright state that the grain is spilled as the result of derailments. So there is some kind of derailment, grain cars tumble over spill all of their grain, and the railroad decides it is not worthwhile to collect it.
This results in piles of grain by the track side which gets wet and starts fermenting, and the grizzlys eat it, get drunk and decide to race trains.
I live in Montana, near a railroad (not the line with the Grizzlies). There are derailments every couple of years on the ~50 miles of track I have visibility for. Two of those were corn/grain that ended up in big piles on the track.
If you look at the shape of those tracks it's more surprising that this only turned into a "minor" derailing, although of course the initial video is sped up quite a bit.
John Oliver had a segment on train derailments a while back (can't find the YT video) and it seems that a lot of US rail infrastructure including the trains are just in very bad shape and there don't seem to be any federal regulations forcing them to invest whereas the environmental damage often ends up being swept under the rug.
Not that German rail is anything to brag about but I can't imagine we'd be allowed to let a train go anywhere near a track that looked like that.
I can't say how the railroads treat cargo, but I can tell you how they treat humans. I got tired of flying and rode Amtrack between Tacoma and Oakland about a half dozen times between 2010-2020 (so a dozen one way rides), until my truck got stolen from their parking lot after they turned off the security cameras and patrols without telling the customers.
On the way back one time we were sitting for hours because a freight had come apart in two places on the only through track. I watched the crews hump couplers brought up from (presumably) Crater Lake past the bar car. Just a day working on the railroad.
They put the train together wrong once, without the crew car between the engines and first class. This meant that first class looked out over the engines. (They duct taped around the door to keep the snow and rain from pouring in.) About a half dozen of us stood there taking turns sharing bottles of wine and looking out the window in the dark as the train went over the Cascades en route to Crater Lake. Very cool.
On the way down one time, shortly after "lights out", there was an excited PA announcement "STAY IN YOUR ROOMS AND DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING METAL" and as I came to I noticed that the lights and ventilation were off and the train seemed to be coasting to a stop. The second announcement that anyone who saw "lights" outside the train should speak to a conductor was no more reassuring. Upshot was the dining car had suffered an electrical fire (coach apparently filled with smoke, but we were spared that in first class). They diverted to some huge rail yard somewhere in the vicinity of Crater Lake where they disassembled the train and put the wretched dining car at the end of the train; they catered in breakfast in Sacramento.
Dunno why all the best stuff happens just north of Crater Lake.
> Money falls out of armoured bank trucks all over highways when it’s supposed to be secured in the back sometimes
I had a few classmates back in high school whose uncles could get you cheap Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein etc that fell out of trucks. Happens all the time. Stuff sometimes just gets lost on the way.
If the price were nearly the same, why would anyone choose to deal with criminals and expose themselves to some level of legal risk when they could get the same product (with a warranty) in a store?
People "deal with criminals" all the time. They don't all wear an eye mask and striped shirts. Every buy choose something from Ebay or an Amazon seller because it was 5-10% less costly than conventional sellers?
You get downvoted but are describing a nice trend. In the old days all you had were stores and poachers. Who was who was easy to tell and the poachers had to suffer a loss. In the modern days, where say novelty sneakers can be bought via innumerable websites the price difference between stores and poachers must have come down. A smart poachers sells stuff that fell of the wagon at retail via pop-up websites. Anything Amazon sells will have fallen of a wagon here or there.
Looks like that would be over 780 people hit by trains per year at that rate. I’m guessing that’s a couple orders of magnitude higher, haha. These bears have a problem on their hands.
780 people hit per year in Montana's population yeah? At national population (1.5/2100/*3.5e6) the Montana train-bear fatality rate would correspond to a rate of 214k people hit per year.
How often do train cars carrying fermented grain come through?
How many bears are actually hit in this manner? (there is just someone saying this is what happens, but no autopsy or anything)
I can’t imagine fermented grain leaks are all that common. I’ve been next to a lot of rail road tracks and never seen leaks. Imagine if you had a leak and it remained for 1000 or 2000 miles.
This story doesn’t make sense
Seems more reasonable a bear doesn’t know what a train is, has gone def or is asleep and just gets hit.
I don't think the railcars are carrying fermented grain, they carry grain which spills and ferments... However getting grain to ferment is somewhat tricky compared to fruit, you need the right amount of water at the right time to get it to malt and then ferment so I'm surprised there's enough of it. Just surprising, not doubting it happens.
I assume the spills are from hoppers with worn out chutes, because I would not expect open hoppers for grain transport.
Yeah, agree. The article takes "bears killed by trains each year" and then "one guy said sometimes they are drunk on spilled grain" and then interpolated for hyperbole.
They don't need to know what a train is to run from one, they are taller and louder than them so instincts will immediately kick in telling them to run.
In evolutionary terms I don't think that there was anything that represented a danger to grizzly bears (save adult males killing cubs) so they may not have evolved behavior patterns to run from big loud things.
I think it's safe to assume that those instincts habe been dialed in long before the current state of relative danger fell into place. Fear of wiry bipeds that aren't actually that big but might carry sparkling stuff would be a far more specific, younger and thus variable fear.
But then on the other hand train speed is dangerously difficult to assess even for us humans who in theory know full well what a train is. I believe that this is because much of the perception of movement is in terms of "size-units over time", which is why a fly at walking speed appears fast whereas big ship at 25 knots appears almost stationary unless you are too close for your own good.
Bears are weird. Cocaine bear actually happened, although it was a very small black bear and it died of an overdose before it could hurt anybody [0].
I've had bears in my yard fairly often. They used to come at night and tear up my porch trying to get to the bird feeders. We finally wised up and stopped feeding the birds.
One time a bear tore up my windshield wipers because I made the mistake of leaving a candy bar in my truck overnight.
Bears are weird, but you learn their weirdnesses when you live in the country.
> According to the bear's owners, the Cocaine Bear has the authority to officiate legally binding weddings in the mall where it is kept due to Kentucky's marriage laws. This claim is only partly true; the bear does not have the authority to solemnize weddings, but the state of Kentucky cannot invalidate marriages performed by unqualified persons if the parties believe that the person marrying them has the authority to do so. As such, it is a belief in the Cocaine Bear's authority that allows it to officiate legally binding weddings in Kentucky.
I'd like to see the divorce proceedings of a marriage solemnized by this bear. Almost certainly your prenuptial is not going to be binding because you cannot reasonably believe you were actually married by a bear. Any good lawyer is gonna rip this one apart.
Many years ago at Lake Shasta, a couple a few spots down the campground from us had the canopy on their truck destroyed when a bear tried to get the cooler they had stored in there.
Unfortunately for them, they were also sleeping back there. They weren't hurt, just badly shaken, and from listening to the woman, I have a feeling she never camped again.
The grizzlies are mentioned in passive voice, which by definition makes a subject acted on (rather than the acting one) in a sentence.
While I see what you’re getting at from a human reader standpoint, in reality the reason for this phrasing (instead of the grammatically equivalent “Trains keep hitting drunk grizzlies”) is that starting with “Drunk grizzlies” just makes for an unmistakably better headline.
Right, the cause for the outcome might be (also messed-up) media industry incentives, but the outcome is still that the more accurate "we keep getting grizzlies drunk then running them over" stance gets replaced by something that reads more like it's their fault.
The messed up incentives of… Seeking as much attention as possible, which is as old as media itself and arguably the very purpose of its existence. Yeah, I guess you’re right. But then again, I’m afraid there’s bigger evils to fight in this world.
Plus in this particular case, apart from the feelings it might generate in more engaged readers such as you, I don’t think the title has further real-life implications.
People conscious enough to actually have an impact on the matter (e.g. those to potentially reach out to organizations, or appeal to railroad companies directly to secure their cargo better) will surely read the article and realize the bears are 100% the victims.
Whereas the people who will think “haha, stoopid wasted bears” and move on, wouldn’t have actively done anything about the situation to begin with. They might still share the article though, which in turn increases its reach and improves its chance of finding someone who cares.
If there’s a fallacy here please call me out, but at this moment I don’t think the “sensationalized” element in this title is a bad thing. At worst it’s neutral, apart from earning Cowboy State Daily some (un)deserved bucks.
I know how big a moose is. I've been uncomfortably close to them more than once.
But I also know how big a train is, and I still don't see it. I know that in terms of mass, a train is to a car as a car is to an empty beer can. A car can derail a train, but won't very often. A moose might weigh as much as a small car, but has less stiff metal in the frame. It still might derail a train... but not very often.
Bear and moose have plenty of fat et al. The derailment isn't a simple metal-on-metal action, it's a metal-on-moose-on-metal interaction. The moose is skin-protein-fat-bone-fat-protein-skin. Do the math.
I'm not sure what math you think I'm supposed to do, but I know that a railroad wheel has ten tons of weight on a strip a couple of inches wide. If a moose is thin enough to not get knocked aside by the snowplow[1], it's probably thin enough to get cut through by the wheel.
Still waiting for some evidence for the claim that "moose are responsible for quite a few train derailments".
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[1] Yes, I know that not all railroad engines have them. Most that don't have a flat plate that still gets down pretty close to the track.
You'd have to be spraying the water pretty hard/fast for it to give the bear enough warning to get out of the way. I'd think that could injure the bear (though I suppose that's better than hitting it?).
I agree that this is not very front page relevant, but its still a lot of animals dying-- since the local bear population is <2000, 1.5 fatalities per year are quite significant!
Compare to just ~700 human railway fatalities in the US (population: >300M)-- if railways were similarly lethal for us, the would be over 200000 deaths per year.
Journalist: "Look, just bear with me. I need to pump out another piece about global war-- I mean climate ch-- I mean extreme weath-- uhh, the environment."
Could they try putting a very very strong and focused spotlight on the front of the train? The light would be visible through their eyelids and wake them up.
The article could be worded differently and submitted to Nature to make it more HN friendly but I figured people might find the content something curious to discuss either way and perhaps give a small taste of the Mountain West to keep things interesting.
