"We lived with her. We loved her. We treated her like a daughter."

Love between men and a bear can sometimes be so intense, it drives them to break the law.

The men shared pizza and Dr Pepper with the bear and gave her free reign of their home in the woods outside Coos Bay. The bear slept in Jonathan Perkett's bed, took showers and even had her hair blow-dried, Rocky Perkett says.

The father and son that found the bear hiding on their Coos County logging site couldn't help but adopt it. What should they have done? Abandon it? Turn it over to the authorities to be shipped off to Guantanamo?

That was never an option to these men.

"We're hicks. We're mountain men," Perkett says. "We took her because she was dying and we loved her.

"The only thing we did wrong was love one another," he says.

But as we all know, Man-Bear love can end only in tragedy. On October 24, after the bear and men had lived in harmony for over two years, Oregon State Police raided their home, and took the bear.

"You could see the hurt in those guys' eyes when we took it," Love says. "But there's no way we could leave that bear with them. It could end up killing someone."

The Perketts may not give up hope so easily.

"Everything they done here was unlegal," Rocky Perkett says. "Since it's all unlegal, I hope they will bring her back."

Excerpted and reinterpreted from http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002594312_webbear30.html