Video shows teenager fighting off bear that attacked her dogs

‘By the time I get there, the bear is literally picking up one of my dogs,’ girl says

A teenager pushed a bear off a fence to protect her dogs, leading to the surveillance footage from her house going viral.

Hailey, 17, went to tell her dogs to stop barking when she came around the house and realised they were barking at a bear sitting on the fence of their California home.

The video, which was widely viewed on TikTok, shows the bear sitting on the fence with her cubs, clawing at one of Hailey’s dogs. Footage shows the teenager running towards the fence and pushing the bear down the other side, grabbed her dogs and hurried inside the house.

Hailey’s cousin Brenda shared the video on TikTok on Memorial Day, 31 May. It has been viewed more than 43 million times so far.

“I was in the mountains so that is actually really normal and it’s summer so they always come now,” Hailey said of the bears in a video on her own account on the platform.

“This is our garden area and the dogs start barking, and I just thought they were barking at dogs, because they always bark at dogs and squirrels or whatever. I go to tell them to stop and when I go over there to see what they’re barking at, I’m like ‘that’s a funny-looking dog’. By the time I get there, the bear is literally picking up one of my dogs,” Hailey added.

“I go over to the bear, I look it in the eyes, and the first thing I think to do is push it. Push a bear, push an apex predator. To be honest, I don’t think I pushed her that hard. I just pushed her enough to make her lose her balance, so she dropped my dog and I ran out of there. I grabbed my other dog, I sprained my finger and scraped my knee, but we’re all OK,” she said.

“She just shoved that bear like it was a stuffed animal,” one commenter wrote.