As our cities sprawl out into the once forested land around them, media reports become ever more frequent of the bears people find rummaging around in carports and campsites. The garbage-can bears that alarm the suburban householder are replaying a scenario that has occurred since our Cro-Magnon ancestors first competed with wild bears for cave space. Classical, German, Asian and Native American oral and literary traditions abound in bear lore, and attest to the close and fraught psychological relationship humanity has always had with Ursus.
In Central Europe today, the count of wild bears has dwindled to double figures. When Italian wildlife officials recently released ten who had been obtained from Slovenia, one cub made his way into Germany where he left a trail of dead chickens and sheep, and struck fear into the hearts of some humans. Not into all however: when he was shot dead by an authorized hunter some members of the public were outraged that “Bruno” had not been relocated to the mountains, and Italy hotly demanded that Germany return the bear’s dead body.
This story is one of many through which author Bernd Brunner (translation by Lori Lantz) illustrates the complicated relationship humans have always had with bears, whose hand-like paws, upright postures and grace and slimness under their thick coats make them seem like our cousins. Indeed, they have been variously called “four legged human,” “chief’s son,” and “old man with fur garment.” Some European kings even as late as the eleventh century believed themselves to be descended from bears.
Bears end up shackled in circus trucks, despondent in zoos, hunted from helicopters and now starving and drowning between melting ice floes in the Arctic.
Brunner neatly knits together biology, myth and literature in this compact survey of human-bear relations. Copious black and white illustrations from popular art, fiction (adult and children’s) and the natural sciences greatly enhance our appreciation of the salient place of Ursus in many cultures. Seen alternately as predator and teddy-bear, dangerous and huggable, the bear perhaps more that any other creature fills our need for both positive and negative archetypes. St. Ursula got her name because she “defended eleven thousand virgins against bears,” a tale which evokes the old man in fur and the “beauty and the beast” theme, and which can also be interpreted, says Brunner, as “the saving of … Christian innocents from the dangers of nature worship.”
The bear is an icon of power, yet in every contest with humanity the bear (as a species, though not every individual creature) is the loser.
The bear is an icon of power, yet in every contest with humanity the bear (as a species, though not every individual) is the loser. Bears end up shackled in circus trucks, despondent in zoos, hunted from helicopters and now starving and drowning between melting ice floes in the Arctic. Brunner’s chapter about the abuse of bears in entertainment, from ancient Rome to Medieval England to modern circuses, is particularly unsettling to read. The cover illustration of Bears captures perfectly the ambiguity of our relationship with these fellow-mammals: it shows a Victorian-era man fist-fighting with an upright bear in a stylized pose at once intimate and adversarial.
Brunner ends with a plea that we sort out our attitudes to this creature which alternately titillates, amuses, challenges and frightens us. “Are they teddies to love, endangered animals to save, or beasts to fear?” he asks. He suggests that “admiration, respectful curiosity, and concern for the bears that share our world” would be the appropriate response. Presumably the first duty of respect and concern would be to protect bear habitat (i.e. wilderness), and the second to call off the sport hunters.
Order this book on Amazon.com Bears: A Brief History
Visit: http://yalepress.yale.edu/
Publisher: Yale University Press
272 Pages
GreenMuze Rating: 
Barbara Julian is a writer and reviewer who can't get over her old librarian's habit of telling people what to read — especially from among the ever-blooming crop of nature and animal books: http://www.animalit.ca/
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