Bear cub mystery at Yellow River Game Ranch

LILBURN, Ga. -
Through the years, one of the biggest attractions at the Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn has been the park's exhibit of Georgia black bears.

But former employees told state inspectors and the FOX 5 I-Team they still have questions years later over what happened when those bears... secretly gave birth.

Former employee Matt Chadwick worked at the Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn in 2012. He eventually lost his job after complaining about conditions at the long time family park: he claimed he saw animals neglected, abused and intentionally killed by workers. Ranch owners responded by saying they've had problem employees in the past, but all the animals have been cared for.

But Chadwick had another concern: the Georgia black bears.

"Every year the male was in there with four females," Chadwick remembered. "They would breed."

According to his complaint to the Department of Natural Resources, Chadwick found a pair of newborn cubs one morning.

"Well, I run up front," he recounted. "I'm excited. That's when I was made aware they weren't allowed to let them breed. And if DNR came in there and you got two cubs, you're in trouble."

Ranch owner Reeves said they didn't know the female was old enough to breed. But we had a larger question. What happened to those cubs?

"We didn't know what do with them and then they disappeared," Reeves explained.

"Disappeared meaning what happened to them?" I asked.

"We assume the female ate them. Later I heard they might have been stolen."

But in his complaint to DNR in 2012, Chadwick told it differently. He said he asked his boss to have those cubs removed but "I was told by ranch management that it would be better for the ranch if the cubs died because the Georgia Department of Natural Resources had warned the ranch not to allow the bears to breed and the ranch will not pay to have the bears neutered." Chadwick wrote he was told the cubs were "crushed to death" by the adults and he found them dead in the enclosure.

"No one here killed them?" I asked owner Reeves.

"No," he responded. "No."

According to Chadwick's DNR complaint, the next year he told the owner he once again found two newborn cubs in the bear enclosure.

"I let them know, hey there's cubs up there," Chadwick told us. "And if I come back in here Monday morning and those cubs aren't there, I'm going to report it. And Monday morning when I showed up for work, they met me on the front porch and had me escorted off the property."

Ranch owner Reeves said Chadwick was actually fired for posting negative comments on social media, and he knows nothing about a second set of bear cubs during that time.

DNR took no action, even though the previous game ranch owner admitted in a local newspaper their bears had bred in captivity. It turned out another former employee insists he also warned DNR years earlier about the same concern: bear cubs disappearing at the Yellow River Game Ranch.

"It was a very awkward situation cause you could tell the uncomfortableness in the air that something was going on," Mike Little remembered.

Little said he made a phone complaint to DNR about bear cubs in 2009. The state could find no record of his call, but Little was so concerned he filed a written one this year. According to that complaint, Little came in early one morning to find people at the bear enclosure carrying something moving in a burlap sack. He said a veteran employee told him "the Bear Cubs that were being born were being removed from the cage/mother."

That was three years before Chadwick's DNR complaint. The two said they've never met. Neither knew the other's story when they talked to the FOX 5 I-Team.

"There is no way he would know the same things and be aware of the same conditions that I was aware of at those two different points in time," stressed Little.

The ranch's previous owner Art Rilling admitted they'd had "a few bear cubs over the years," but insisted they all died of natural causes or disappeared.

"If someone said they were killing bear cubs that would have gone up pretty high on the list," said a DNR spokesman, but the department could not find any record of investigating either employee's complaint.

Current owner Codi Reeves said the ranch eventually paid to have their lone male bear sterilized. He died a few years ago. Both former employees say they lost their jobs trying to reveal the bear cub secret.