Daily Sitka Sentinel

Elderly Dog Survives Bear Encounter

By TOM HESSE

Sentinel Staff Writer

A pit bull named Monkey is back on his feet after he was nearly killed while horsing around with a bear. 

After being bitten several times by a brown bear in Port Alexander last week, Monkey was flown to Sitka and patched up by veterinarian Burgess Bauder.

The dog’s owner, Joe “Otto” Smith, said Monkey got in trouble when he decided to run with a group of dogs that are more familiar with bears. 

“My parents’ dogs are pretty savvy to bears and they bark when they’re around and sometimes go tearing off to the beach to do what, we don’t know, I guess chase bears,” Smith said. “And my dog is kind of a city dog. He spends his summers in Alaska and he’s not a chaser. He’s never done it once in 12 years.” 

But this time Monkey followed the other dogs out of Port Alexander’s  Laughing Raven Lodge and down to the beach. Susan Taylor, who was in the lodge at the time, said Smith knew Monkey was in over his head and went running after the pack. 

“Joe went after him right away trying to call him back, but the bear had nabbed him,” Taylor said. 

When Smith rounded the corner, he said, the yearling bear already had hold of Monkey and was taking him off into the woods. 

“I heard horrible dog screaming and knew right away what was happening ... I came around this island. It had my dog in its mouth and it was carrying it to the woods,” Smith said. While he watched, the bear dropped Monkey and started gnawing on the 12-year-old dog. 

“All I could see was my dog’s paws sticking up out of the grass,” Smith said. 

It’s at this point in the story where Smith’s fishing status becomes relevant. Smith operates the F/V Caribou and Monkey, as an aging pit bull, has trouble getting on and off the vessel without help. Because of this, the dog wears a harness with a handle on top that allows Smith to give Monkey a lift on and off the boat. 

“I think when the bear was carrying the dog away from me he had a big chunk of the harness in his mouth. And when I thought he was eating my dog he was actually trying to figure out what was happening with this thing on my dog,” Smith said. 

While Smith’s family and others at the lodge were running for a gun Smith started throwing rocks at the bear to get him to leave Monkey alone. Smith, who stands at 5’11” said the bear wasn’t fully grown but was likely still taller than he was. 

“Definitely not a full grown bear, but not a cute cuddly thing either,” he said. 

The bear didn’t react to the first barrage of rocks, which inspired Smith to keep pestering it. 

“I probably shouldn’t have in hindsight. But I threw some little rocks at it and it was just ignoring me, which kind of emboldened me because at least it wasn’t charging me. So I picked up a bigger rock with two hands, took a few running steps and threw it over my head at the bear.” 

The rock found its mark and the bear ran into the forest. 

Smith said Monkey started crying again and when he inspected the dog he found around a dozen puncture wounds. 

“He looked horrible. He was covered in blood and bear slobber,” Smith said. 

This all happened around 6 p.m. Another Port Alexander resident named Kevin Mulligan offered to fly Smith and the dog to Sitka, a distance of over 30 miles, if Monkey made it through the night. 

“We were pretty skeptical that Monkey was going to live through the night,” Smith said, adding that he’d previously had a dog clawed by a bear that didn’t survive.

Monkey did make it through the night, and the next morning Smith loaded him into Mulligan’s plane and flew him to Sitka to see the vet.

“This poor animal came in on a stretcher. Oh, he hurt so damn bad he couldn’t even stand,” Bauder said. 

“He’d been bitten over the chest, around the neck and back on the hind end over his flank.” 

Fortunately for Monkey, those bites didn’t cause significant internal damage. 

“Anytime you see those bite wounds on the outside you have to worry about what’s under there,” Bauder said. 

What was under there was a small pneumothorax – a partially collapsed lung. Bauder said Monkey was fortunate that his injuries were relatively easy to treat.

“All you do is sew up the hole on the outside and load him up,” Bauder said. 

The dog got a cocktail of pain killers and antibiotics to deal with infection risk. 

“Bear bites have a rich variety of micro-organisms those teeth carry and deposit under the skin,” Bauder said. 

About a day after Bauder tended to the dog, Monkey was back on his feet. He’s back with his owners at Port Alexander now, and Smith said he’s slowly getting back to form. 

“He’s still really stiff. He’s a 12-year old dog but he’s up and walking around. He doesn’t bounce quite as much as before but I’m optimistic that he’ll be close to normal in the next couple of days.” 

Taylor said the dog’s grown accustomed to all the extra sympathy at the lodge. 

“He kind of likes to be hand fed now, since we started doing that after he’d been shaken. So he’s liking that,” Taylor said. 

Bauder has had one of his own dogs killed by a bear and has seen a handful of other cases where bears have killed and eaten dogs. In over 40 years of being a vet, he said, most encounters end with the dog either being too quick for the bear to grab, or the bear killing the animal. 

“Encounters where they’re bitten and escape? Few and far between.” 

Smith said during the night before they flew to Sitka he made a promise that if Monkey lived he would spoil the dog for the rest of its life. 

“That’s a promise I intend to keep,” he said.