Mystery of black bear cub found dead in New York’s Central Park

Police are trying to establish how a dead black bear cub came to be found in New York City’s Central Park, home to a zoo which does not include the animals.

The remains of the animal were discovered under a bush on Monday by two women walking dogs. It showed signs of trauma, leading to suspicions that it was the victim of animal cruelty.

Florence Slatkin, who lives near the park, said that she and a friend were leaving when her friend’s terrier spotted something near a bicycle lying on the ground.

“At first, we thought it was a bag of clothes or maybe a dead dog,” she told the Associated Press.

But then, as they got closer, they realised it was a very small bear “with its mouth wide open and scratches on the side.”

The cub’s head was on top of the back bicycle wheel, Slatkin said. “It was terrible, and it was the strangest thing,” she added. “Why was the bike there?”

Police dusted the bicycle for prints while the corpse was being sent to Albany, where the state department of environmental conservation was due to perform a post-mortem.

Bears are not among the park’s known wildlife population, and there are no bears at the Central Park Zoo.

Bears were also not reported missing from other zoos although populations of black bears have been on the increase around the city in recent years.

One of the highest black bear densities in the US is in New Jersey, where the current number of bears in general is about 2,500.

A man hiking in a heavily wooded area of northern New Jersey was killed by a black bear last month, in what experts called an extremely rare attack.

In 2002, a bear killed a five-month-old girl sleeping outside her family’s summer home in New York state when it grabbed her and dragged into the woods of the Catskills mountains.