Zoo Owners Accused of Taking Bear to Dairy Queen for Ice Cream

Dairy Queen DQ
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Two owners of a zoo in Alberta, Canada, are facing charges for allegedly taking a young bear through a Dairy Queen drive-thru to get ice cream.

CTV News reported that Doug Bos and Debbie Rowland, owners of Discovery Wildlife Park in Alberta, plan to plead guilty to two counts—one for taking the bear out for ice cream and one for failing to properly notify the provincial government before taking the bear off zoo property on several other occasions.

“What we got charged for under the act was that we failed to notify them that we were going to do those things,” Bos told CTV. “We were busy. We made a mistake, and we didn’t email them and tell them.”

The charges came about after the wildlife park posted a video on social media in January of them taking a one-year-old Kodiak bear through a Dairy Queen’s drive-thru window, where the store owner hand-fed the bear a spoonful of ice cream.

Wildlife officials promptly investigated the incident after the video went viral, leading to the charges against the zoo owners.

The zoo claimed that the drive-thru run did not cause a danger to public safety because the bear had been chained inside the vehicle and the event took place before the Dairy Queen had been scheduled to open for the day, the Guardian reported.

Bos and Rowland plan to enter their guilty pleas at their next court appearance on May 28.

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