Bears Facts

In 2001, a lion, tiger, and bear cub were found in a drug dealer's basement. They were moved to Noah's Ark sanctuary and have lived together as inseparable best friends ever since.

In 1949, an official boxing match between a bear and a man was held. The bear won.

A full-grown bear can run as fast as a horse.

In 1943, Polish soldiers in Iran bought a bear cub from a young boy, bottle-fed him on condensed milk, named him Wojtek, and enrolled him in the army. At Monte Cassino in 1944, he carried 100-lb artillery shells to the guns without dropping one. The 22nd Artillery Supply Company still uses a bear carrying a shell as its official emblem.

It has been estimated that a bite from a grizzly bear can crush a bowling ball.

Smokey Bear was a poster before he was a real bear. In 1950, firefighters in New Mexico found a three-month-old black bear cub clinging to a burned tree, his paws scorched from a wildfire. They nursed him back to health, named him Smokey, and sent him to the National Zoo in Washington DC. He lived there for 26 years. He got so much fan mail he was given his own ZIP code: 20252. He is buried in Capitan, New Mexico.

Winnie-the-Pooh was a real bear. Harry Colebourn, a Canadian soldier headed to WWI, bought an orphaned cub for $20 at a train stop in 1914 and named her Winnipeg. When he shipped out to France, he left her at London Zoo, so gentle that keepers let a boy named Christopher Robin climb into her enclosure and feed her condensed milk. He renamed his teddy bear after her.