NATURE
Eight bears: mythical past and threatened future
from Gloria Dickie (Norton £25, 272pp)
There are eight species of bears today. Can you name them?
I came to the black bear, the brown bear, the polar bear and the panda bear, with vaguer ideas about a spectacled bear – and what about the grizzly bear? Is that a species?
The actual list of bears that share our planet came as a surprise. Grizzly bears are not a separate species, they are just a subspecies of the brown bear.
The same goes for Alaska’s mighty Kodiak bears, which can weigh up to a ton and stand ten feet high on their hind legs. Yes.
The other species you may have missed is the sloth bear of India, a hopeless name, as it is not a sloth at all, just a bear – and one of the most dangerous of them all; the spectacled bear that lives in Ecuador and Peru; and the sun bear and the moon bear, or Asiatic black bear, of Southeast Asia.
Pandas generally prefer nibbling bamboo shoots and sleeping to the arduous task of producing even more pandas
In her wonderfully revealing and compelling account, Dickie begins by asking why the bear captures the human imagination so much.
Other animals can be charismatic and beautiful, but few children go to sleep at night cuddling a toy eagle or leopard.
Still, there are some fictional bears: Winnie the Pooh, Paddington Bear, Rupert Bear. . .
“I have yet to come across a story about a vile bear,” says the author, as sinister wolves are everywhere.
It’s hilarious to learn that in the original Goldilocks, the intruder is an ugly, foul-mouthed old woman, and that the three bears are gentle souls who aren’t sure how to get rid of her.
This predilection for bears is also found in many tribal cultures, where the bear is referred to as grandfather or wisdom teacher. If you’re hungry in the woods, say whatever, just eat what the bear eats.
There is an intense sense of resemblance to a bear and human. Yet the modern world is proving grim for these amazing creatures, along with so many other wildlife.
By the end of this century there may be only four species left. What a failure this would be for them and us. If we revere them like that, they’ll need a lot more protection and wild space to roam.
Dickie explains that pandas are just too lazy to fight other species for calories
But where bears are more tolerated, the results can be mixed. In the US, black bears are protected and their numbers have exploded. Now they move into the cities, foraging from dumpsters.
A bear that wandered way too close to an elementary school in Colorado and had to be shot was recently found to have enjoyed a diet of “two steaks (still in packaging), pasta, potatoes, eggs, avocado, paper towels, apples.” , lunchmeat and carrots – all salvaged from nearby dumpsters.”
In the longer term, this could lead to semi-urbanized bears being as fat and malnourished as many people are today on their diet of fast food and junk food.
The spectacled bear is of course Michael Bond’s Paddington bear. They like to eat fruit high up in the trees in their native cloud forests, but “there is no record of a spectacled bear ever eating a marmalade sandwich.”
A shy and elusive creature, the author himself fails to discover any on a field trip and they remain an attractive mystery.
Far more alarming is the Indian sloth bear, which is responsible for more human deaths than any other species, attacking some 150 people a year. Short-sighted and ill-tempered, they will attack anyone who startles them on a forest path.
They can be so nervous, naturalists think, because while other bears occupy the top of the food chain in their environment and can generally relax, sloth bears live alongside ferocious hunters and stalkers like leopards and tigers.
A sloth bear’s only defense is to “explode in a fit of fur, blunt teeth and claws when threatened.” They’re not particularly blessed in terms of looks either, with “loose, protruding lips,” often dripping down the mouth.
The Asiatic black bear, or the sun bear and moon bear, is native to Southeast Asia
There is a very funny chapter about panda bears. They eat bamboo almost exclusively, which isn’t very nutritious, but since no other animal really wants it, it’s easy to pick.
Pandas, “one of the laziest members of the animal kingdom, don’t bother fighting other species for calories.”
Sex also takes some effort, which is part of the reason their numbers are so dangerously low.
Captive pandas have been variously encouraged with doses of Viagra, “panda pornography,” and even adult sex toys, but to no avail.
In general, they prefer nibbling bamboo shoots and sleeping to the arduous task of producing even more pandas.
Far more disturbing is the fate of sun bears in Vietnam and China, which are ‘bred’ for their bile: another barbaric ‘traditional medicine’.
Farmers cut into the bear’s liver and insert a needle to drain the bile. “Animal welfare advocates who have witnessed this farming method say the bears ‘moan and quiver’ throughout the process.”
Bears often succumb to infections from surgical wounds. There are about 20,000 bears in China’s bile farms, says Dickie. It’s legal there and costs $1 billion a year.
A grizzly bear, a subspecies of the brown bear, sits proudly in a wildlife park
Bears, like many other wild animals, can attack a human because they are startled, scared, cornered or hungry.
But for this kind of industrial-scale atrocities, it’s embarrassing to say you really need people.
Will we learn to coexist with all our bear species, protect them and see them return to healthy numbers?
Or will we still claim the entire planet for ourselves, leading to further extinctions – and eventually our own?
Dickie concludes: ‘Losing bears would mean losing a beautiful and complex relationship. We would lose a grandfather, an uncle, a mother, a medicine man and a teacher. And in some ways we would lose some of our own wildness.”