Video Of 17-Year-Old Shoving A Bear To Protect Her Dogs Goes Wildly Viral

A 17-year-old girl took on a black bear, shoving it in order to protect her dogs, and the video in which she told her story has gone viral.

Featured Video
Hide

The TikTok video has received more than half a million views in its first day on the platform, courtesy of the brave teen’s cousin, plus close to another 150,000 on the brave teen’s own TikTok account.

Advertisement
Hide

The video relays the story of Hailey Morinico, who fended off a black bear that was scampering on the top of a wall in her family’s yard. Today shared the incredible footage, captured via security camera, to its own site and on Twitter. The video showed Morinico rushing to push the bear off the wall after it swiped at one of her dogs.

In the TikTok, she explained, “We live in the mountains, so this is totally normal.” She heard her dogs barking and thought that they were just barking at other dogs or squirrels. But, as it turned out, a bear had emerged on her family’s property.

“When I went over there,” she relayed in the video, “I thought, ‘That’s a funny-looking dog.”

Morinico, who is wearing a finger splint in the video, shows a picture of her littlest dog, Valentina, which the bear appeared to be targeting. “As her slave, I have to protect her,” she cracked.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, there is a bear and it is taking my dog,” she told Gadi Schwartz on the NBC morning show. “It is lifting her off the ground, and if I don’t do something about it, who knows what might happen to her.”

“The first thing I think to do is push the bear,” she noted in the TikTok. “Push a bear. Push an apex predator.”

Advertisement
Hide

She then grabbed a dog and ran away from the wall. She relayed that even though she sprained her finger and scraped her knee in the incident, she’s otherwise fine, living to be able to tell an incredible tale.

Morinico’s cousin, Brenda Lopez Rincon, marveled upon seeing the video, according to BuzzFeed, “I felt a mixture of shock and a little proud of her because of how brave she is.”

She added, “We immediately told her to NEVER do that again.”

Share this article

*First Published: June 2, 2021, 10:07 am