Three Orphaned Grizzly Bear Cubs Bound for ‘Bearizona’ Refuge

After dozens of phone calls around the country and the world, three (not so little) orphaned grizzly bear cubs now have a new home in Arizona.

The cubs, who were orphaned after their mother had an encounter with a hiker near Depuyer, was injured, and had to be euthanized by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks personnel.

After spending the last few weeks at the Wildlife Center and Montana WILD, the word came down that a new home for the cubs had been found.

Interim Education Bureau Chief Laurie Wolf with Montana FWP said the ‘Bearizona’ Wildlife Park in Williams, Arizona would take the cubs

“It came about through a lot of hard work with a lot of people involved,” said Wolf. “We’ve been working for the past seven weeks to try to find a permanent home for them, and it’s been challenging because of COVID 19, and there’s very limited space out there for grizzly bears. We’ve been putting lots of calls out and we’ve also worked through the channels of the AZA accreditation. They have a mechanism in place where they send out emails to all the zoos countrywide, and we ended up getting a response from ‘Bearizona’.”

Wolf said the facility has been searching specifically for grizzly bear cubs.

“They’ve been wanting to get grizzly bear cubs for many years now,” she said. “They have the plans in place to build a brand new exhibit. We did a lot of research and made a bunch of phone calls to agencies that we know down there to make sure that they were going to be a good fit and to make sure that they were going to meet the standards that they are able to going to meet the standards that we have for grizzly bear placement and they were able to meet those so we selected them to be the recipients of these three cubs. They’re very excited and so are we.”

Wolf said she was gratified to see the passionate interest in the welfare of these orphaned bears.

“I think the most exciting part of this was to see how passionate people are about our state’s wildlife,” she said. “I’ve had people coming out of the woodwork, not just in Montana, but all over the country. It’s great to see how much people care.”