Bears as Predators ~

[brotherbear]

'California Grizzly' by Tracy I. Storer and Lloyd P. Tevis Jr. - copyright 1955.
The Spanish Californian had a temperament too emotional and fiery for him to be content with a quiet and humdrum existence. Craving excitement and color and being free to devote himself to the "grand and primary business of enjoyment of life," he seized upon every opportunity for dangerous sport, social gaiety, and devotional pageantry. He was adept at arranging spectacles - from solemn Mass in his missions to all-night dances in his adobes and thundering rodeos on the range - in which color and drama, and not infrequently blood and violence, combined to arouse the emotions. But of all these forms of excitement, nothing so impressed and horrified the Anglo-Saxon visitor - and was least understood by him - as the fights between grizzlies and wild bulls that were staged during fiestas and on feast days and Sundays at the missions, pueblos, and presidios. 
These fights were an outgrowth of the sporting heritage and temperament of the people. In Spain, ever since the Latin races had first gone to the Pyrenees, battles between bears and bulls had been a form of amusement ( Kingsley, 1920 ). The Californian colonists, therefore, would have been untrue to their ancestry if they had failed to avail themselves of an exceptional opportunity to continue this tradition. Grizzlies, present in abundance, could be captured with the reata, and cattle were numerous. Natural conflicts with bears on the range were proof of the inherent antipathy of the two species. Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that in California the bear-and-bull fight reached a higher stage of development than anywhere else in the world. Reply