You can't play dead any better than by being a corpse buried in a coffin, but that isn't enough to save some Russians from bear attacks. Hungry bears have been raiding Russian cemeteries and eating bodies, behavior that some officials say has been caused by a shortage of the bears' usual food after a particularly scorching summer.
Some experts, however, say the bears have plenty of food and they are raiding cemeteries out of laziness, treating the graveyards as big "refrigerators." In a region near the Arctic Circle, one bear learned how to open a coffin and "then taught the others," a World Wildlife Fund official said. "They are pretty quick learners," she added.