Cooper Landing is having a surprising moment of internet virality.
An Instagram video of four dogs sparring with a brown bear on a Cooper Landing property has more than 30,000 likes, and a reposted version on Facebook has more than 1,000 shares. A USA Today article describes the video as capturing an intense “battle” between a brown bear and dogs.
The video was taken this month on Jen Harpe’s property in Cooper Landing. She’s a dog trainer, but said the dogs featured in the video are her own personal pets, and they weren’t necessarily trained for the task.
“For the most part, it’s instinctual for these guys,” she said. “I’ve had dogs that protect the property for generations, and so one dog teaches the next.”
Harpe said the bear in the video got closer and closer to the property over the course of several weeks, until it was about 20 feet from her deck.
In the video, the bear has visible injuries around its neck. Jacob Pelham, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game office in Soldotna, said this bear isn’t any more dangerous than others in the area, and hasn’t been aggressive toward people, as far as he knows.
Harpe’s neighbor, Michelle Donahue, also got a visit from that bear. She and her husband first saw it on their home surveillance camera. They’re used to having movement on camera because of the dogs next door at Harpe’s house.
“So the camera goes off a lot and we say ‘dog’, ‘dog’ just being funny,” Donahue said. “We were coming up the hill, a half mile away, and the camera went off and we said ‘dogs’ and Todd said ‘nope, bear.”’
She said it looked like a juvenile, and she could see its injuries on video. She said for weeks, a neighbor group chat buzzed with texts, warning of the bear’s location and its curiosity toward people.
But Donahue said that’s just a part of life in Cooper Landing.
“This is where we live. We live in bear country. I think what everyone needs to do is just keep your garbage picked up, keep your yard clean, and we can all live together just fine. I think you expect that when you move where you move,” she said. “We live in Cooper Landing, we’re gonna have bears.”
Pelham, with Fish and Game, said his advice to residents is just to remove all bear attractants and hope the bear moves on.
Harpe said she never expected for the video to go viral, and she doesn’t read any of the comments. She said she lives in the woods for a reason.
