Customers at a Tennessee restaurant just got a huge surprise when a young bear cub stole their pizza from them!

Carolyn Ball, a waitress at Howard’s Steakhouse in downtown Gatlinburg, explained that a black bear cub came up to the restaurant from a nearby creek and started eating pizza that had been served to a customer.

“Last week, we had a bear climb up a tree from the creek and onto the patio where some customers were eating. The bear surprised them. They obviously got up and left the food on the table. The bear stood on the table and ate a pizza,” Ball said.

The restaurant is located just a few hundred yards from Great Smoky Mountains National Park where wild black bears are rampant.

Though Ball jokingly referred to the patio as “pet-friendly” when she posted about it on Facebook, many were not amused by what happened.

“No one should allow that… you need to scare the crap out of him so he leaves. Stop feeding him! He’ll be killed if that keeps happening,” one Facebook user wrote.

“Instead of taking pictures while the bear eats pizza, why not be QUICK to scare him off. This is like giving a death sentence to this bear. This makes me very sad, and ashamed. Soon TWRA will have no choice but euthanize this bear because of poor choices by humans. Grrrr,” another added.

However, Ball said that she did not “mess” with the bear at all.

“I let it finish the pizza because I don’t want to mess with a bear when it is eating. I don’t want to be attacked or eaten myself. At that point, it was already on the table eating the pizza, so just let it finish and then ran it off,” Ball said. “We don’t intentionally serve bears. They come up and serve themselves.”

Biologist Dan Gibbs, who works for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, agreed that people should be angry about this.

“If you have a bear that has already lost its fear of people so much that it is climbing on a crowded patio in the middle of the day, it is not going to reverse that behavior. Bears escalate their behavior, so this was a bear that has worked its way up to doing this. It didn’t just decide one day to go to a restaurant,” said Gibbs.

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