Vermont Governor tries to feed bears.

I won’t dwell on this one too much; I’m sure my old mate Bawb is all over it.

The North Eastern United States contains a large number of the sort of people that consider themselves to be the font of all wisdom. This is nicely balanced by California in the far South West, where a similar group regard the place as a cornucopia of good ideas for running the country, but that’s another story.

In between is ‘flyover country’ where the population tends to watch the ideas rushing back and forth with a mixture of laughter and rage. These people for whatever reason fail to understand how much better their lives would if they just accepted that the elite knows what is best for them.

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin states in his ‘about Peter’ section of his webpage; “He likes to fish, hunt and garden and can sometimes be found spreading manure and cutting hay at the dairy farm where he is a partner.” (The bull manure presumably, is saved for spreading over the entire state.)

Any Vermont hunter just knows how to deal with bears that raid bird feeders, you just go out there and take the feeders away from them and shoo them away, none of that Tennessee Davy Crocket stuff of grinning them down. Unfortunately, bears tend to lack culture and in this case thought they would supplement their diet with a bit of red meat:

A LATE-NIGHT encounter with four bears trying to snack from backyard bird feeders has given Vermont's governor a lesson in what not to do in bear country. One of the bears chased Peter Shumlin and nearly caught the governor as he tried to shoo the animals away, he said on Friday. "I had a close encounter with a bear. Four bears to be exact,'' Shumlin said.

Shumlin said he had just gone to bed inside his rented home on the edge of Montpelier late on Wednesday when the bears woke him up. He looked out the window and saw the omnivores in a tree about 1.5m from the house trying to get food from his four bird feeders.

"I open up the window and yell at them to get away from the bird feeders. They kind of trot off,'' Shumlin said on Friday. "I go around to the kitchen to turn the lights on and look from the other side and they're back in the bird feeders. So I figure I've got to get the bird feeders out of there or they're going to make this a habit.”

He said he then ran out and first grabbed two of the feeders. As he grabbed the other two and made his escape, "one of the bigger bears was interested in me.” "It was probably six feet (two metres) from me before I slammed the door and it ran the other way,'' Shumlin said.

Governor Shumlin is a Democrat.