Moving moment drowning bear cub begs fisherman for help

Two lovely bear cubs barely escaped a terrible fate when a fishing boat full of tourists saw them struggling in the water and two heroic fishermen teamed up to help them get on board.

The incident that took place in Lake Vygozero, in the Karelia region of northern Russia, as Mirror UK reported, was caught on video and shared via YouTube on September 28, 2017, where it had been watched thousands of times.

According to the news outlet, the cubs’ mother seems to have overestimated their ability to swim, and by the time the boat encountered them, the young animals were hardly keeping their heads out of the water to keep breathing.

As soon as the desperate cubs spotted the boat, they gathered all the strength they had left and started to approach it seeing the last chance to survive. Read more on our Twitter account @amomama_usa

The tourists on the fishing trip understood they had to let the cubs board the ship or else they were going to perish, and two men set to the task, careful not to touch the bears directly fearing they could bite them.

As can be seen in the footage, one of the men put a net underneath one of the cubs to help him up, as they kept encouraging the animal to make it to safety.

“Take a rest, little one, take a rest. Hold on, hold on. But what if he bites us?” said one of the men, with the other replying: “No, he won’t, he’s just clinging to his life.”

"Don't be afraid, just don't be afraid. We'll rescue you, don't be afraid. It's heavy! The net is rotating," one of the tourists/fishermen said before the first cub managed to climb onto the boat.

After seeing that the cub was not in any way aggressive towards its saviors, the men went on to carry the second bear, as it was exhausted from all the time he battled to stay afloat.

"It was dangerous, of course. But they are living creatures. We couldn't just look the other way," said Ruslan Lukanin, from Moscow, the man who uploaded the video to his YouTube channel.

“They had swum [across the lake] with their mother. But she overestimated her strength and swam away. The cubs began to sink. We picked them up and dragged them to the island to which their mother had swum.”

-Ruslan Lukanin, Mirror UK, October 2, 2017.

After the tourists saved the lives of these two cubs, they left them in the island where they saw the mother as she left her sons behind, unaware that they were having such a bad time trying to swim after her.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a human family received a great surprise when they took a look out of their house’s window and discovered 5 black bear cubs and their mother taking over the small pool in the backyard.

The mother filmed the whole moment as the bears roamed free at their backyard in their home in Rockaway Township, New Jersey.

Basso’s daughter, a young girl, can be heard on the background asking what will happen to her little pool.

Men and bears have shared habitats for thousands of years, and many times the bears have been in danger in proximity with humans, more than the other way around, so it is good to see that both species can get along.