While there are plenty of examples that romanticize the danger associated with bears, the reality is animals prefer to be left alone.
While there are plenty of tales of Alaska's fearsome bears, this 2017 photo illustrates how bears prefer to spend their days.
“Oh, the day is going to be wonderful,” the enormous bear thought in a language we could not know, as his nose told of a promise for breakfast. Lumbering from his lofted perch, a plan forming without conscious thought guided him to a distant valley, whose floor displayed a tortured ribbon of bare earth where breakfast morsels often walked upright toward distant peaks.
Those memes always make me chuckle a bit, and when I see them, I think about what that might look like for bears. The possibilities seem endless, and maybe there are some out there, and I haven’t seen them. “Oh sure, we see them when we are in the field, but we respect their space, and in turn, they seem to respect ours. We pay attention to the area and the time of year, and the dogs don’t care much about other animals; they are bird hunters. We put bells on them to announce their presence, and we have had bears come out of alder patches when the dogs get close,” Christine told Ron.
I told him of coming to Alaska with visions of bears around every tree, and how delighted I was as a young boy, with the prospect of shooting my way through every encounter in the outdoors, carrying a .44 on my hip everywhere I went. When the reality set in after a couple of years of rarely seeing a bear, unless hunting for them, much less having to shoot one to save my life or some damsel in distress, my dreams were crushed.
Fear is obviously a useful emotion. It prevents the extinction of most living species. But irrational fear, or more aptly, panic, produces irrational responses in many things. Healthy fear, or perhaps better said, healthy respect, leads one to the path of intelligent avoidance, like avoiding moose calves or bear cubs. Panic might lead to shooting a bear in “self-defense” before there is a realistic threat.
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