Mysteries of the Bear

I watched a Nat Geo show recently, "Mystery Bear of the Arctic". The mysterious bear in question turned out to be, discovered through extensive DNA testing, to be a polar/brown bear hybrid, with a polar mother and a brown father, the only one of its kind yet found (they speculate that because both species often birth multiple cubs, there could be others still out there). I'm not entirely convinced by the "reasons" given for such a union - that grizzly would have had to travel an unheard of distance, into a range where they are not known to go. But given that both species either avoid interaction entirely if they do meet, or that such interactions usually involve a violent conflict, this is a curious and fascinating idea to consider. Then again, I'm a little over-informed and over-interested in bears.

Still, I can't help but dwell on the reasons the bear was discovered in the first place. Ridiculously rich American man spends $25K to participate in escorted polar bear hunt by Native Inuit guide. The whole situation feels morally questionable and exploitative. That photo says it all.

The Book Excerpt

After almost four years, The Animal Book is finally in print!
Here's what the editors have to say about my essay...

“…Those of us who have shared our lives with animals may recall a time when we ‘lost our eyes’ and thus attained a fuller vision. Perhaps one day it will dawn on us that our dog finds us difficult to communicate with—that the problem was ours—instead of vice versa; we might have realized suddenly what our horse has been telling us all along about the field we tried to force him through. Melanie Dylan Fox has loaned her eyes in this way to the black bears of Sequoia National Park. In ‘Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear,’ Fox examines her responsibility to the bears she has come to know in their trespassed habitat. Like Steeves and other contributors to this volume, she also ponders the etymological and semantic quandaries that accrue to us when we attempt to speak about such knowledge. We must violate ‘traditional grammatical rules’: each bear for example, is a ‘he,’ a ‘she,’ a ‘who’ with an individual temperament, not an ‘it’ or a ‘that’ with merely a species identity.

In the tradition of Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, and more recently, of Loren Eiseley and Barry Lopez, Fox looks at animals through the dual lenses of science and myth. Like Eiseley in the title essay of The Star Thrower, or Lopez in Of Wolves and Men, Fox seems hopeful that some verbal concatenation of empirical detail and mystical insight might inspire the reader’s own exploration and discovery. Her cross-species, social relationship with bears has changed her forever, and the experience she describes is available to all who expand their conceptions of what is possible.”

Hmm. My essay contains empirical detail and mystical insight. Cool.

Only You Can Prevent...

Maybe it's just my over-protectiveness when it comes to animals of the ursine variety – after having lived alongside them in sequoia for so many years – but as sad as this story is, I still can't help but think: Wild animals are wild animals, and human carelessness can be prevented. And once again, it's the animals who were doing nothing more than trying to live their lives as they're meant to, who ultimately suffer the fate of this carelessness. If you go around tempting the Fates and petting bears like they're happy-and-harmless-bumbling-ole-Pooh, bad, bad things are bound to happen. As simple as that. People really, really need to think about what they're doing. Grr.