THE riddle of the Lowveld “bear”, sighted last week about 10km outside Nelspruit, was solved this week when the creature showed his bark was worse than his bite. The Lowvelder newspaper reports it was all a case of mistaken identity and the “bear” is a brown bouvier cross-labrador. The dog looks so much like a bear that his owner, Elzabe Potgieter, named him “Beer” (Afrikaans for “bear”) when she first saw him at the SPCA in Pretoria. “Beer”, who loves roving around the Potgieter’s smallholding outside Nelspruit and swimming in the local river, was trotting along a dirt road last Wednesday when Nelspruit secretary Rina Otto spotted him and got the fright of her life. Louw Steyn of the Mpumlanga parks board admitted that the trackers who had said the strange paw marks did not belong to a dog or hyena had been mistaken. “We have never seen such a big dog paw print before and with his long nails, it was totally misleading,” Steyn said.