The PETproject

06/07/2026

A fox at Grand Teton National Park stole thirty-two shoes from a campground in three weeks. The park put up wanted posters. The internet laughed. Then campers started leaving their shoes out on purpose hoping the fox would come back.

That is how a fox dies.

The shoe thefts started in late June 2025 at Lizard Creek Campground, on the northern shore of Jackson Lake. Campers began reporting missing footwear. Not food. Not coolers. Not trash bags. Single shoes. One sneaker here, one flip-flop there, taken from outside tents and vehicle doors overnight. By June 26, the count had reached nineteen, and Grand Teton National Park put up a poster at the campground entrance featuring a sketch of a fox holding a shoe in its teeth.

WANTED FOR GRAND THEFT FOOTWEAR. Aliases: Sneaker Snatcher. The Midnight Mismatcher. Swiper the Fox. Crimes: Stealing left shoes (they taste better), flip-flops, and campers' pride. The poster tracked a running count: 19 pieces of footwear reported missing. Days since last fox/shoe incident: 0.

The poster went viral. National media picked it up within days. The park posted a video to Instagram set to audio from Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa featuring a taxidermied fox and a pair of hiking boots. The tone was funny because the situation was funny. A wild fox was collecting shoes and nobody could figure out why. The park asked the obvious question: What does the fox do with the shoes? We still do not know. Maybe it is a toy. Maybe it is nesting material. Maybe it is fashion.

Then the count jumped from nineteen to thirty-two.
Park spokesperson Emily Davis and wildlife biologist John Stephenson explained what happened. Campers who saw the wanted poster and the viral video started intentionally leaving their shoes outside, hoping the fox would visit their site. The warning designed to reduce the behavior had accelerated it. People were baiting the fox with footwear because they wanted to see the famous shoe thief in person.

Stephenson said what needed to be said. Where we as a park get concerned is when you cross that line from habituation to food conditioning and start associating people with food. There are foxes in the park that are habituated, meaning they tolerate human presence. Those animals are typically not a threat. Food-conditioned animals are a different category entirely.

In 2018, Grand Teton staff euthanized a food-conditioned fox that had been observed walking from car to car in a parking area begging for food. That fox had crossed the line. It associated vehicles with calories. It approached humans expecting to be fed. Once that association is established, it does not reverse. The animal becomes a public safety liability and the only management options are relocation, which rarely works with small territorial canids, or lethal removal. The 2018 fox was killed because someone, at some point in the preceding months, fed it.

The Lizard Creek fox was not food-conditioned yet. It was not eating the shoes. Retired biologist Franz Camenzind, who studied coyote behavior at the National Elk Refuge near Jackson for decades, told the Cowboy State Daily that the behavior was consistent with normal canid curiosity. Canines carry strange things back to the den to chew on. A mother fox with kits might haul objects back for the young to play with. Camenzind had found leather scraps, plastic, and all sorts of chewable material around coyote dens. A fox carrying a sweaty shoe back to a den full of kits is not feeding. It is playing, or providing enrichment, or simply doing what canids do with interesting-smelling objects they find on the ground.

Shoes are the sweatiest, saltiest thing a camper leaves outside. A human foot produces roughly half a pint of sweat per day. The shoe absorbs it. To a fox, a worn hiking boot sitting outside a tent is a concentrated scent bomb of salt, skin oils, and organic compounds that register on a canid nose from yards away. The fox is not attracted to the shoe as footwear. It is attracted to the most intensely human-scented object in the campground, and it is light enough to carry.

The problem is not the shoe. The problem is the distance. Every shoe the fox carries away from a campsite is one more successful trip to a human-occupied space. Every successful trip reinforces the association between the campground and a reward. The reward is not food yet. It is novelty, play material, scent stimulation. But the campground is also full of food. Coolers, snack bags, grease on grills, crumbs on picnic tables. A fox that visits thirty-two times for shoes is a fox that has walked past food thirty-two times without taking it. The question Stephenson was asking is how many visits it takes before the fox stops walking past the food.

The park updated its guidance. Store shoes in tents, bear boxes, or vehicles. Do not leave footwear outside for any reason. Do not bait wildlife. If you see a fox acting unusually bold or approaching within twenty-five yards, report it to a ranger. The language was still friendly. The subtext was not.

Even unintentional behavior, the park wrote on Instagram, like leaving shoes out just in case he visits teaches wildlife that people equal opportunity. And that can lead to relocation or worse.
The last fox at Grand Teton that learned people equal opportunity was killed by the park staff that had tried to keep it wild. The Lizard Creek fox is still alive. Whether it stays that way depends entirely on whether campers can stop treating a wildlife management problem as entertainment. The fox does not know the difference between a shoe left out by accident and a shoe left out as an invitation. It only knows that every time it walks into the campground, something good happens.

Thirty-two times and counting.

Source: Grand Teton National Park / Jackson Hole News and Guide / Cowboy State Daily / Backpacker Magazine.

06/05/2026

Come see us at Backyard Bash next weekend!

Live Music will be "Born in November" and will run from 6-9 pm! but the event begins at 5 pm

06/04/2026

In the early 1980s, a Pennsylvania bear biologist named Gary Alt carried an orphaned black bear cub into a winter den, placed it beside a sleeping wild mother, and walked out. The mother woke up in the spring raising one more cub than she had given birth to. She never knew the difference.

Then Alt tried it outside the den, in spring, and the mother smelled the strange cub and killed it.

That failure is what led to the Vicks VapoRub.
Alt was the black bear biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission for twenty-seven years. During that time, he expanded the state's bear population from roughly three thousand to nearly fifteen thousand animals. He also dealt with a problem that every bear state faces. Orphaned cubs. A mother bear gets hit by a car, gets shot during season, gets killed in a management action, and leaves behind cubs that are too young to survive alone. The standard options were captive rearing or euthanasia. Alt wanted a third option. He wanted to give the orphan to a wild mother who was already raising her own.

The biology said it should not work. A black bear mother identifies her cubs by scent. She licks them after birth, and the chemical signature of her saliva marks them as hers. If she encounters a cub that does not carry her scent, she treats it as a threat or an intruder. Outside the den, in the active season, a mother bear that smells a strange cub will reject it. In some cases, she kills it. Alt learned this the hard way.

Inside the den was different. A hibernating mother is in a reduced metabolic state. Her senses are dampened. Her aggression is lower. Her discrimination between her own cubs and a stranger's is weaker. Alt tested the theory by opening a winter den, placing an orphaned cub beside the sleeping mother's existing litter, and backing away. The mother did not wake. The orphan nestled against her body alongside her biological cubs. When the family emerged in the spring, the mother was raising all of them. The orphan had been absorbed.

The technique worked reliably in the den. But orphaned cubs do not always appear in January. Sometimes they show up in April or May, after the mothers are already active and mobile and operating with full sensory awareness. Alt needed a way to introduce orphans to awake, alert mothers without the mother detecting the scent mismatch that would trigger rejection or killing.

He tested two approaches. In the first, he treed a mother bear and her cubs using dogs, released the orphan into the trees, and kept the mother separated from all the cubs for two to seven hours. The extended contact between the orphan and the biological cubs during the separation appeared to transfer enough shared scent that when the mother returned, she accepted the group without identifying the newcomer. The orphans were accepted.

In the second method, Alt sedated the mother, smeared Vicks VapoRub in her nostrils, and placed the orphan with her while she was unconscious. When the sedation wore off, the menthol overwhelmed her olfactory system. She could not distinguish the orphan's scent from her own cubs' scent because she could not smell anything except eucalyptus and camphor. By the time the Vicks wore off, the orphan had been in contact with the mother and siblings long enough that the scent lines had blurred. The orphans were accepted.

Alt later refined the technique further. He found that simply rubbing Vicks VapoRub on the orphan cub, without sedating the mother, was enough to inhibit aggression during introduction. The menthol on the cub's fur masked the foreign scent long enough for the mother to begin treating it as part of the group.

One Pennsylvania mother that supplemented her diet with garbage raised six cubs through the summer, including two orphans Alt had placed with her. Six cubs from a single sow is an extraordinary litter by any measure. The mother did not distinguish between the four she had birthed and the two that a biologist had carried in from somewhere else and smeared with cold medicine.

Lynn Rogers, the Minnesota bear biologist whose long-term research we referenced in the Bear 56 post, confirmed and expanded on Alt's work. Rogers published a framework in 1985 describing four options for orphaned cubs: returning them to their own mothers, introducing them to foster mothers, leaving them alone or transporting them to favorable areas, and raising them in captivity for later release. He noted that mothers with cubs would readily accept strange cubs in dens and sometimes outside dens under certain conditions. The den introduction, Rogers wrote, was the cleanest option. The mother's reduced state during hibernation made acceptance almost automatic.

The technique is still used today. In February 2020, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries placed an orphaned cub, rescued by a dog that had carried it home in its mouth, with a wild foster mother nursing three cubs of her own. Virginia's wildlife center maintains GPS-collared female bears specifically so they can locate denning mothers when an orphan needs placement.

Conservation officers track the collar, listen for cub sounds in the den, assess whether the mother has capacity for an additional cub, and make the placement. The mothering instinct is just very strong in most animals, wildlife biologist Bill Bassinger told reporters. Generally, most females will take the young back, even after it has been handled by humans.

A black bear mother that would kill a strange cub on sight in May will adopt it without question in February if you put it beside her while she is sleeping. A black bear mother that would kill a strange cub on sight in May will adopt it without question in May if you rub enough Vicks VapoRub on the cub to overwhelm her nose for an hour. The difference between a dead orphan and a living one is timing, temperature, and a two-dollar tube of menthol ointment from a drugstore.

Gary Alt figured that out in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania with a sedated bear, a jar of Vicks, and an orphaned cub that had nowhere else to go. The technique he developed has been used in bear states across the country for forty years. Every spring, somewhere in the Appalachians or the Rockies or the North Woods, a wildlife officer opens a den, places a cub beside a sleeping mother, and walks away knowing that the mother will wake up in April and count one more mouth to feed without ever questioning where it came from.

Source: Alt, G.L. (1984). "Cub Adoption in the Black Bear." Journal of Mammalogy 65(3). / Rogers, L.L. (1985). "Aiding the Wild Survival of Orphaned Bear Cubs." Wildlife Society Bulletin. / North American Bear Center / Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

06/04/2026

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZF7vIFsYW2/?igsh=MXU4Y2RtM2U2c3d3Yw==

06/02/2026

A bride cancelled her own marriage ceremony at 4am after a relative of the groom struck her dog for barking throughout the event.

The event occurred in February 2026, when the bride's dog started barking amidst pre-wedding traditions and a young male from the groom's party attacked the creature using a stick.

The bride instantly declined to proceed, declaring she would not marry into a household that displayed cruelty toward animals.

The dispute intensified into a physical altercation involving both families before law enforcement intervened to mediate.

Presents were returned and the marriage was abandoned, with the bride's stance going viral and attracting extensive praise from animal welfare advocates who deemed it a display of principled courage.

06/02/2026

05/29/2026

A Virginia opossum in Nebraska managed to eat more than half of a Costco chocolate mousse cake and accidentally saved her own life in the process.

The story began in Gretna, Nebraska, when resident Kim Doggett ran out of refrigerator space just before Valentine’s Day. To keep a large Costco chocolate cake cold, she placed it outside on her back deck, a strategy that usually works perfectly during a Midwestern winter. Instead, it turned her patio into an irresistible wildlife buffet.

When Doggett's son went outside later that day, he found a bloated opossum curled up on the patio furniture. The cake was nearly gone, the cushions were covered in muddy chocolate paw prints, and the opossum was panting heavily and refusing to move. Realizing the animal looked visibly unwell and knowing that chocolate is toxic to many animals, the family called for help.

Local animal control officers safely removed the marsupial and transferred her to Nebraska Wildlife Rehab. She arrived with a hilarious intake note that read, "Opossum was brought in due to having eaten an entire Costco chocolate cake." The internet quickly dubbed her the Cake Bandit, a fitting title for a creature that already looks like a masked, wide-eyed backyard scavenger.

While the situation started as a funny neighborhood story, the medical evaluation revealed a much darker reality. Because of the massive load of sugar, caffeine, and chocolate, the rehabilitation staff administered fluids and ran a comprehensive battery of tests, including X-rays and bloodwork. The results showed that the opossum was suffering from severe lead toxicity.

According to Laura Stastny, the executive director of Nebraska Wildlife Rehab, lead poisoning is a tragically common and invisible killer in local wildlife. The chocolate cake didn't cause the lead poisoning, but the cake is exactly what got her caught.

Without her sugar-induced food coma, the opossum would have slipped back into the woods with a fatal level of toxins in her bloodstream, completely unnoticed by humans until it was too late. Instead, her terrible dietary judgment left her stranded on the one porch where she could get help.

The rehab center immediately started her on chelation therapy to strip the heavy metals from her system, paired with a strict zero-chocolate diet. The Cake Bandit ultimately survived her ordeal, proving that while overindulging in a stolen dessert is usually a mistake, it was the exact miracle this opossum needed to live.

Source: Nebraska Wildlife Rehab reporting on the Cake Bandit opossum

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