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In the children's story of Goldilocks and the three bears, a little girl breaks into the bears' home and eats their porridge.

An upstate New York family is living that story, but in reverse.

The Knowles family - who live, ironically, in Bearsville, N.Y. - have had their home broken into and trashed by a mother bear and her cubs three times this month.

According to a report in the Times Herald-Record, Martin Knowles and his wife and children came home on Friday, July 13, to find that their kitchen had been ransacked by bears.

The family went out to dinner that evening, and locked the house up tight, but when they came home a few hours later their home had been trashed again.

They cleaned up, but the animals came back the following day. The bears trashed one of the children's rooms, and even defecated on the bed, the newspaper said.

State wildlife specialists decided the mother bear was a nuisance and would have to be killed.

Officials fired two shots at the bear but missed. She and her cubs haven't been back to the house since.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.