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Claim:

A Wyoming man was arrested for DUI while riding a bear near Yellowstone National Park in October 2025.

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Rating:

A rumor that a Wyoming man was arrested for DUI after riding a bear near Yellowstone National Park circulated online in early October 2025.

The story first appeared on Facebook (archived), where users shared it widely. People later presented it as a true story when sharing it to other social media sites, such as Reddit (archived). Snopes readers sent us emails asking whether the story was true.

The post as it appeared on Facebook was as follows:

Wyoming Man Arrested for DUI After Riding a Bear Near Yellowstone

YELLOWSTONE, WY – A man from rural Wyoming was arrested late Saturday after being caught on police body cam riding a full-grown grizzly bear while drinking from a bottle of vodka.
 

According to the Park County Sheriff’s Office, the incident occurred on Highway 14 just outside the Yellowstone boundary. The man, identified as 38-year-old local “outdoors enthusiast” Lars McCready, was reportedly “traveling westbound on a bear at approximately 7 miles per hour with a visible open container.”
 

Body cam footage shows McCready wearing a fur hat and striped shirt, appearing unconcerned as an officer approached. “I told him to dismount the animal,” the deputy’s report reads, “but he said, quote, ‘It’s fine, he’s the designated walker.’”
 

The bear, described as “surprisingly cooperative but unimpressed,” was released back into the wild after the encounter. McCready, however, faces multiple charges including DUI, wildlife endangerment, and “operating an unlicensed mode of transportation.”
 

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When asked for comment, a Wyoming Game & Fish & Insects spokesperson simply sighed and said, “We’ve seen a lot, but this is new.”
 

Casper Planet obtained the footage under the state’s public record law and can confirm that while the bear didn’t say anything, it definitely looked disappointed.

Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events. However, Snopes could find no evidence that the story was real, and a Google search found no reports of such an incident published by reputable outlets.

The rumor about the man being arrested for DUI while riding a bear originated from the Casper Planet Facebook page, which describes its posts being humorous or satirical in nature. Its about section states:

Delivering the Snews that doesn’t matter directly to your Snews feed. Did we say this is satire? Well it is, names/locations are made up

Casper Planet sometimes references made-up state agencies in its stories, often with names similar to real agencies. For example, there is no state agency called Wyoming Game & Fish & Insects. However, there is a Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

The still images apparently from bodycam footage were generated with artificial intelligence and were first posted online by another Facebook page sharing a different made-up story. A day before Casper Planet’s Oct. 5 post, StoryTime, which frequently posts false stories alongside AI-generated images, shared the image and a story of a man in a rural Russian town downing a bottle of vodka on bearback as he was being arrested. A day after Casper Planet posted its story, another Facebook page (archived) took the same images and much of Casper Planet’s story and shared it as an incident that supposedly took place in Oregon.

The text in the corners of the top screenshot were the most obvious indicators that the image was AI-generated. Various letters and numerals were malformed and some words were turned into illegible nonsense. Generative AI often struggles with text on images.