From our other sites
The story
Along a prefectural road inside Mt. Daisen National Park in Tottori Prefecture, roughly 40 kilograms of loaves of bread and chicken liver were found illegally dumped over the course of five days. Bear sightings have been reported repeatedly in the area, fueling speculation that the dumping is an attempt to lure bears with food.
On 5ch, users traded theories about who was behind the dumping and why, and one comparison drew particular attention: that it resembles the “baiting” technique used in American bear hunting.
Day after day, “large quantities of bread” and “chicken liver” illegally dumped along a prefectural road inside Mt. Daisen National Park… about 40kg over five days. “A purpose completely different from ordinary illegal dumping” — bear sightings reported in the area… risk of leading to feeding behavior
Published 8/20 (Thu) 19:20
BSS San’in Broadcasting
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
so that's ¥8,000 for ten loaves.
Are they really spending that kind of money just to pull this off?
At first I figured it was just unsold bread being dumped.
Probably unsold stock or bread past its sell-by date.
Has to be someone connected to bread manufacturing or sales.
It's a manufacturer illegally dumping it, I bet.
Disposing of industrial waste costs real money for a factory.
Probably one of those premium bread shops that sprang up like weeds for a while —
business must be struggling.
That's Ōuchiyama, not Ōyama —
known for its milk and a zoo.
Probably discarded bread —
either a waste collector or someone who bought it off a vendor.
I'm a local, and I've got a pretty good idea whose it is.
There's video too, so now it's just a matter of gathering the rest of the evidence.
If it were about animal welfare, they wouldn't feed bears raw chicken in the middle of summer — that's basically poisoning them lol.
It's just illegal dumping.
I used to work that kind of job — if a batch came out too hard, the whole run had to be rebaked.
Returned loaves got sold to employees for ¥100 each, but a good chunk of it still ended up thrown away.
These days if you post "please help" on social media, freeloaders would swarm and it'd be gone in no time.
There's no demand for minpaku rentals in Tottori.
Given the quantity, it's got to be a company.
A company could offload it through livestock farmers, so this is probably beneath that — an individual.
Oversized loaves of bread are a specialty item, so it should be easy to trace.
Pair that with the chicken liver and you can narrow it down further.
Near Mt. Daisen in Tottori, the only nearby city is Yonago, plus the Genghis Khan (grilled mutton) restaurants up on Mt. Hiruzen.
A bakery might well have liver pâté lying around.
But if the chicken liver is part of the same set, that theory doesn't hold up as well.
I could buy that if it were just tossed and abandoned, but it was placed at even intervals, deliberately out in the open — so that theory doesn't fly.
Hurry up and give them the death penalty.
Zooming in on what looks like moldy bread and broadcasting it into people's living rooms — that's some tone-deaf reporting.
Wait, it had mold on it?
Fuji TV's morning show "Mezamashi" described it as "baked up nice and fluffy" lol.
If anything, they're probably just cheaping out on proper waste disposal costs.
The chicken liver's probably an ingredient for some kind of sandwich pâté too.
Bears are carrion eaters, so they'll eat it even somewhat rotten.
True enough.
Plenty of bears seem to prefer rotten meat,
so this really does look like deliberate, intentional feeding by a person.
Somebody should run a toxicology test on it.
Could it actually be for extermination purposes?
I won't say it's everywhere, but I'd bet quite a few people are scattering bait like this in various places.
It's just too strange that bears would suddenly start showing up near people, simultaneously, in so many places, over just the past few years — that can't be coincidence,
not unless deliberate feeding like this is going on.
> In Maine, USA, bear hunters start setting out bait in August, and the method here — leaving out huge amounts of bread for days, then adding strong-smelling liver later — is oddly similar.
Though even in the places where it's practiced legitimately, there are rules: keep it away from roads, post signage, get the landowner's permission, etc.
So maybe it really is bait after all.
You can't shoot a bear once you've lured it somewhere with people nearby, so…
it does seem to be based on the logic of luring them in, apparently.
It's not just similar — it's literally the same thing.
Background and Key Points
Mt. Daisen sits inside a national park in Tottori Prefecture, one of the regions that has recorded a sharp rise in Asiatic black bear (tsukinowaguma) sightings over the past several years, as poor acorn and beech-nut harvests push bears down from the mountains toward roads and farmland. Illegal dumping itself is a criminal matter under Japan’s Waste Management Act regardless of intent, which is why posters kept circling back to who had a plausible commercial reason to discard 40kg of bread — a bakery, a delivery service handling returns, or an industrial waste problem someone wanted to avoid paying to solve properly.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t whether this was suspicious — everyone agreed placing bread and chicken liver at regular intervals along a road was deliberate — but whether the motive was economic (cheap disposal of unsellable stock) or environmental (someone trying to bait bears, either to help them or, per the poisoning theory, to kill them). The Maine comparison pushed the “intentional lure” reading furthest, though even that commenter noted legal baiting there requires permits, distance from roads, and posted signage — conditions this site plainly didn’t meet.
What the thread doesn’t spell out for outside readers is that baiting is not a recognized or legal method of bear management in Japan at all; there’s no equivalent hunting-license category for it as there is in Maine. So any “baiting” here, welfare-motivated or not, sits entirely outside Japan’s actual regulatory framework for handling nuisance bears, which relies on live traps and licensed cull hunts, not food lures — making this dump either reckless amateur intervention or, as several posters suspected, an attempt to draw bears toward people intentionally.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “[Tottori] Bread and Chicken Liver Illegally Dumped Day After Day Inside Mt. Daisen National Park… About 40kg Over Five Days… Bear Sightings Reported in the Area… Risk of Leading to Feeding Behavior.”
Leave a Reply