Dumpster-Lined Easy Street

So these human families forage for good-tasting and maybe, sometimes, occasionally healthful food. They eat what they want. They put on weight for the winter ahead -- and the spring and summer and fall. They share leftovers with pets, who get fatter than they should. And then they toss out the rest. The bears, who are not your Goldilocks brand of bruins, follow their bulbous, sensitive noses to forage for food. Who cares about healthful? They come upon large feeding containers behind apartments and restaurants where every day humans get on their hind legs and for some inexplicable but fortunate reason deposit garbage bags splitting with the most aromatic delectables. Hard to believe people throw away perfectly good garbage. But it’s nice of them to use dumpster lids so easily flipped open by hairy scavengers with large appetites, growls and teeth.

Big surprise: The bears get fatter than your average bear. And more clever and lazier. Makes sense. Have you ever seen bears work out? So if a creature in suburban wilds can chow down on fish bones and steak carcasses without lifting a claw, who in his right bear mind would opt for chasing something with a tail or digging up crawly critters with eight legs? A new study published in the Journal of Zoology reveals a keen grasp of the obvious. Garbage-eating bears tend to eat more because more is available. Before hibernation, a black bear can put away 20,000 calories a day, even on the Atkins diet. Who could afford that much food at Jenny Craig? These bears tend to pork up, weighing 30% more than wild bears who work for a living. Urban bears like to lay around more. Wild bears forage 13 hours a day, whereas suburban bears refuse overtime, usually knocking off after the standard eight hours. Few bears jog or do Pilates.

So what we have is a society of adult humans who eat way too much and get fat. A growing population of children and pets who eat too much and get fat. And now too many bears who eat way too much and get fat. Who’s responsible for this sad obesity?

Clearly, full blame rests on the nation’s fast-food places. And the advertising industry that so cleverly makes us eat good-tasting bad things lying around and then not work out. Loudly denounce both of them the next time you use the drive-thru because you’re too stuffed to waddle inside.