Survival Skills of Bears

[brotherbear]

The Beast That Walks Like Man by Harold McCracken.
( Theodore ) Roosevelt early recognized that they ( grizzlies ) are as diversified in individual temperaments as men; and he was one of the first to advance the belief that these mighty mammals have changed their attitude toward men and become far less bold, from learning that their human enemy with a gun in his hands is an entirely different proposition than their hairy ancestors had known, when there were only primitive Indians with stone-age weapons of offense.
"My own experience with bears tends to make me lay special emphasis upon their variation of temper," he wrote in 1897, in an article on "The Bear's Disposition," for the 'Book of the Boone and Crockett Club', of which he was one of the editors. "There are savage and cowardly bears, just as there are big and little ones; and sometimes these variations are very marked among bears of the same districts."

Roosevelt had a great deal to say on these important subjects, although he never quite made a thesis of it. As early as 1885, in his 'Hunting Trips of a Ranchman', he had this to say: "Nowadays these great bears are undoubtedly much better aware of the death-dealing power of men, and, as a consequence, are much less fierce, than was the case with their forefathers, who so unhesitatingly attacked the early Western travelers and explorers. Constant contact with rifle-carrying hunters, for a period extending over many generations of bear-life, has taught the grizzly by bitter experience that man is his undoubted overlord ... and this knowledge has become an hereditary characteristic; though if he is wounded or thinks himself cornered he will attack his foes with a headlong, reckless fury that renders him one of the most dangerous of wild beasts." Reply