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A Florida woman and her dog narrowly avoided a bear attack outside their home in Sanford. And it was all thanks to a bag of cookies she was able to utilize to facilitate their escape.
The woman, Kristen Savage, and her dog Ringo, a 13-pound chihuahua mix, were out for a walk near their home when they came face-to-face with the bear. Making matters somehow worse, the bear turned out the be a mama that was intent on protecting her cubs.
“I heard a bird. I was looking for a bird in a tree, and then I saw a black thing come at my leg,” she told WKMG News. “I thought it was an off-leash dog at first, and then I realized it was a giant head.”
Savage says the bear was particularly interested in her little dog.
“I just pulled him away and eventually I had him hanging in the air, dangling around,” said Savage. “I had him up in the air like this and she would chase him, and I was spinning in a circle. I spun around so many times I fell, and that’s when I got my leg cut up pretty good.”
Seemingly stuck with nowhere to go, she told Fox 35 News, “At one point, I thought, ‘We aren’t going to get out of this,’ because there is no one here to help me.”
Then Kristen Savage remembered the cookies her mom had just given her.
“My mom, she lives just down the street, and she had just stopped and handed me a bag of cookies for my kids,” she recalled. “When I remembered I had them in my hand I took the bag and I whacked the bear across the face with it, and then I threw it. She came forward and then she sniffed and she put her head down and sniffed the cookies and we ran to the front door.”
Naturally, because it’s 2025, the encounter with the bear was caught on the family and her next-door neighbor’s doorbell security cameras.
“I don’t put blame on the bear. I’m sure she was just as scared as I was. As a mom I would do whatever I could to protect my babies and I’m sure she was doing the same,” said Savage, who added that from now on, she “will always carry something. An air horn, whistle, something that can scare her off.”
Content shared from brobible.com.