mot du jour

I watched a documentary on bears this afternoon. It seems to be a recurring thing that when I watch documentaries about nature, I get nostalgic and frustrated. I can't help but think about how much nature has been affected by our (human) presence and feel guilty and angry about it. And what I find the most interesting and disturbing is that we have found ways of demonizing certain animals in order to validate our fears which stem from our lack of knowledge and understanding of them. This is especially true for predators like bears which we have painted many different lights and have persecuted for centuries. The documentary opened with this quote from Chief Dan George of the Burrard Indian Reserve No. 3 in North Vancouver:
"If you talk to the animals, they will talk to you, and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them, and what you do not know you will fear. What one fears, one destroys."
It took a chance encounter between a bear cub and the president of the United States of America to spark a change in the public's perception of bears. In 1902, Theodore (aka Teddy) Roosevelt, while on a hunting expedition, came muzzle to muzzle with a cub and in a moment of compassion, he chose not to shoot the defenseless animal. The Washington Post ran a editorial cartoon created by the political cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman that illustrated the event. The story spread and lead to the creation of a new toy in his name, the Teddy Bear.

About a year ago I watched an episode of CBC's The Nature of Things with David Suzuki called The Bear Man of Kamchatka. It chronicles a bear expert by the name of Charlie Russell as he rescues two orphaned cubs destined for death in a squalid Russian zoo. He either buys them or takes them away to his home in the remote wilds of the South Kamchatka peninsula, in the former Soviet Union. He keeps them in an enclosure at night, a sort of coop, but during the day, he takes them on adventures in the wild to teach them. These two little cubs know nothing about how to be a bear so Charlie becomes their surrogate mother and shows them the lay of the land in their new home territory, what plants to eat, how to catch fish and how to escape from predatory male bears.

Charlie loves the bears, but ultimately must let them go so they can be free. He has done all he can to help them survive in the wild. But bears are like humans – they need their mothers. At one point in the documentary, trouble arises when two strange bears come back to Charlie's cabin. Upon closer investigation, he realizes that they're two of the cubs Charlie thought had died –  they've returned to the only home and the only mother they know. Charlie sees that they're too thin and appear to be malnourished so he grabs his walking stick and with familiar sounds and calls to the bears, leads them to the shoreline where weaker or sick fish are a quick dinner. After an afternoon of feeding, Charlie says goodbye again.

In a world where “might makes right” and aggression becomes the only way to deal with conflicts, Charlie Russell is proving that it is possible to live peacefully with one of the world's most feared and misunderstood creatures. At many points, Charlie's compassion, patience, bravery and dedication brought me to tears. If only there were more people out there in the world to help educate the uneducated, to help paint a different picture of these animals so that we understood they aren't unpredictable, savage beasts, but powerful wild animals that should be treated with respect.

"… you have to have a basic understanding to know where you cannot go. This is the edge. You cannot step over this edge. The edge was a way back there behind me somewhere, I thought. But I've been going ahead and finding, no, the edge is a way out here somewhere… So I'm exploring out there… in the unknown…"
Charlie Russell