When your front door opens, who do you expect will enter the house?
If you live with other people, you might expect your partner or spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings, or maybe your roommates will be on the other side of the door.
For Susan Kehoe, who lives in Highland Lakes, New Jersey, when her front door opened, it wasn’t a person on the other side.
It was a big black bear.
Yes, a black bear used his mouth to open the door to Susan’s home. It’s a good thing Susan was right there by the door when it happened.
She was able to drive away the bear without anyone getting hurt. How?
She used her voice.
Susan used a calm, soothing voice to tell the bear to go and close the door behind him.
“They can tell by the tone of your voice,” Susan told Inside Edition. “Like if I talk like this, ‘Oh, what a good boy,’ or ‘Stop it!’ They know.”
Susan happens to be an expert.
It also helps that Susan is a black bear biologist and has spent years of her life studying and gathering data on them.
So when the black bear opened her door, she knew what to do.
“Close the door, sweetie,” Susan told the black bear in a soothing, soft voice. “Close the door. Close the door. Good boy!”
At first, it looked like the black bear didn’t understand what she was saying.
As soon as he opened the door, he placed his front paw over the doorway and on the rug by the door.
Susan had to repeat what she said several times to make sure the black bear heard her.
And he did.
The black bear stepped back and used his mouth to grab the doorknob and pull it closed.
He didn’t fully close it so Susan knew he was going to try to open it again.
“You’re going to open it again, aren’t you?” Susan asked the bear. “Close the door, you little stinker.”
She kept encouraging him to close the door all the way with her very calming voice.
As it turns out, Susan lives in an area where black bears are a common sight. And this particular bear also paid her a visit a few months ago.
When Susan opened her front door, she discovered this bear right outside. And she did the same thing, she talked to him in a calm voice to drive him away.
“Bears are damn smart! This bear learned how to close the front door to my house,” Susan wrote on the YouTube video of that first visit.
This explains why, besides her job, Susan wasn’t shocked or scared at the sight of a black bear entering her home.
What would you do if you discovered a bear opened your front door?
Most people would definitely run for the hills or get aggressive with the bear.
But it’s good to see videos like this to know what can be done in situations that involve black bears.
They’re smarter than we think.
Not every black bear will be like this one, that’s for sure, but it’s good to learn more about them through people like Susan.
See Susan give this curious black bear a gentle scolding in the video below!
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