Family raise massive dog... then discover it’s a bear

A family in a remote part of China adopted what they thought was a puppy, only to discover two years later that it was actually a bear.

A woman in Yunnan Province, China, thought she was buying a Tibetan mastiff puppy, but the animal would not stop growing thanks to its ravenous appetite.

A family in a remote part of China adopted what it thought was a puppy, only to discover two years later that it was actually a bear.

Su Yun, who lives in a village outside the city of Kunming in Yunnan Province, bought what she was led to believe was a Tibetan mastiff puppy while on vacation back in 2016, according to reports.

Tibetan mastiffs are huge dogs with thick black-and-brown coat. Males can weigh as much as 70kg.

A woman in Yunnan Province, China, thought she was buying a Tibetan mastiff puppy, but the animal would not stop growing thanks to its ravenous appetite.

The owner said she was immediately struck by her pooch’s insatiable appetite, which had him wolfing down a box of fruits and two buckets of noodles daily.

Two years on, Su’s pet was tipping the scales at 113kg and getting ever bigger. When the woman noticed the animal’s unusual knack for walking on two legs, her bewilderment escalated to alarm.

“The more he grew, the more like a bear he looked,” Su told Chinese media.

The owner’s growing suspicion about her pet’s true nature did not sit well with her because she admitted that she is “a little scared of bears.”

Su Yun, who lives in a village outside the city of Kunming in Yunnan Province, bought what she was led to believe was a Tibetan mastiff puppy while on vacation.

Su reached out to the authorities, who quickly identified her supposed dog as an Asiatic black bear, which is classified as a vulnerable species.

A fully grown male Asiatic bear, also known as a Himalayan bear or moon bear, can weigh up to 180kg.

Su’s bear, who had lived in her home this entire time, had to be tranquillised before being carted off to the Yunnan Wildlife Rescue because staffers who arrived to collect it were too scared to interact with the wild animal while it was fully alert.

Video shot by a Chinese media outlet in May 2018 showed the large bear with a glossy black coat and an unmistakeable white mark on its chest, which is the hallmark of the species, gorging on an orange inside a cage.

Officials reported at the time that the bear was living a healthy life in its new home.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission