A black bear with only two legs was sighted in the mountains of West Virginia.
Kirk Price, an outdoorsman based in West Virginia, told USA TODAY Monday that his trail camera spotted the two-legged animal in the Appalachian Mountains in southwest West Virginia.
Price, who shared videos and images of the two-legged bear captured by his trail camera on Instagram, said he believes the bear to be an approximately 8-year-old male. Price said he first found out about the bear in 2018, and the animal was "smaller then and has almost doubled in size since originally spotted."
"At that point he was already walking around by himself and was not a cub," Price told USA TODAY over email. "A cub usually stays with their mother until close to 2 years old."
Price said while he has only seen the bear once in person, he and several others have seen the animal multiple times on trail camera photos and videos over the years.
"He’s very illusive and is rarely spotted in person," Price said. "He lives in the mountains. Believe it or not he moves around quite a bit. He has roughly a 5-mile radius."
In a 2022 video posted to YouTube, Price spoke about his experience of witnessing a two-legged bear live and said when he got up close to the bear, the animal had "clean nubs" making him believe it was born that way. Price, who was with his dogs in the area, said the bear looked healthy and ran up the hill after he got his dogs away from the animal.
The bear has not been given a name by those who have seen him, and Price said they "normally just refer to him as the 'two-legged bear'."
The rare find is reminiscent of a two-legged bear named Pedals, who was spotted many times in New Jersey before he was believed to have been killed during a hunt in 2016.
While many users on Price's Instagram post speculated that the bear's lack of front legs are the doing of a hunter, Price says he "firmly believes" the bear was born with only two hind legs and the absence of his front legs is not because of any external factors.
"I firmly believe he was born that way and has overcome all odds. That’s what the focus should be on. This bear is truly amazing," the outdoorsman added.
Price further said that hunters should be not suspected to be the “bad guy” in the story. Price said that while he himself is a hunter and hunts bears and eats them regularly, he is also a "firm believer in conservation" and loves seeing them "thrive on the landscape."
"This particular bear is special, and I would never purposely hunt him," Price said.
USA TODAY has reached out to the West Virginia Department of National Resources for more information about sightings of the animal.
Saman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] and follow her on X and Instagram @saman_shafiq7.