Bears as Predators ~

[brotherbear]

The Grizzly, Narrative of a Hunter-Naturalist by William H. Wright.
His Fierceness. We now arrive at a division of our subject where we are to meet what, at first sight, appears to be a tangle of contradictory evidence, and it behooves us to walk slowly, to preserve an open mind, and to keep our eyes carefully attentive to the signs of the trail. On the one hand, we shall find the sincere convictions and repeated statements of early writers, and a century of unquestioning belief on the part of the public. On the other, we shall find the calmer judgments of trained observers, and the overwhelming weight of contemporaneous experience. Were our fathers wrong about the nature of the grizzly? Or has the animal radically changed in a hundred years? 
Personally, I believe that we have to answer "Yes" to both questions; but I am convinced that the amount of alteration in the nature of the grizzly is insignificant compared to the extent to which preconceptions of early hunters colored their judgment. 
Let me say, to begin with, that twenty-five years of intercourse with these beasts has taught me to regard them with the most profound respect. I would no more provoke one, unarmed, or rashly venture upon any action that my experience has taught me they regard as calling for self-defense, than I would commit suicide. That they will not fight when they think they have to, no sane man would maintain. That, when they do fight, they are not the most formidable and doughty of antagonists, I have never heard hinted. But that they habitually seek trouble when they can avoid it, or that they ever did, I do not believe. Nor, in the authentic records upon which this popular belief is largely founded, and in which it was first put into words, can we find any facts calculated to uphold it. Reply