Bear and Big Cat Attacks

You've probably read the news that Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Aime Huguenard were mauled to death by a brown grizzly bear in Alaska. Treadwell treated brown bears as pets, and denied that they were dangerous:

"At best he's misguided," Deb Liggett, superintendent at Katmai, told the Anchorage Daily News in 2001. "At worst he's dangerous. If Timothy models unsafe behavior, that ultimately puts bears and other visitors at risk."

The same year, Treadwell was a guest on the "Late Show with David Letterman," describing Alaska brown bears as mostly harmless "party animals."

Now a tape recording found at the scene reveals that in the end Treadwell was pleading with Huguenard to beat the bear off of him. Suffice it to say that treating wild predators as cuddly cause celebes in need of human protection is a good way to wind up as an object lesson in a Jon Krakauer book.

This week also saw performer Roy Horn being attacked by one of his tigers. His co-star, Siegfried Fischbacher, claimed that the tiger drug Horn offstage to protect him. Experts dispute this, noting that the big cat sunk its teeth in his neck. Even after witnessing a tiger attack Fischbacher is apparently unable to conceptualize the nature of a predator. As another example of the way some people idealize man eaters, consider the case of Frances Frost, another victim of a big cat:

A couple of years back, a cougar killed a dog near the home of Frances Frost in Canmore, Alberta. Frost, an ''environmentalist dancer'' with impeccable pro-cougar credentials, objected strenuously to suggestions that the predator be tracked and put down. A month later, she was killed in broad daylight by a cougar who'd been methodically stalking her.

That excerpt comes from Mark Steyn's review of Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev's eco-friendly version of "Peter and the Wolf," in which a marauding wolf is captured, then re-introduced back to the wilderness.

I have some experience in this area. My degree is in biology, and my first job out of college was working as a field biologist in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I hiked into the woods, for miles in some cases, off-trail, alone, to collect water samples at nine study sites scattered across the park and its adjoining forests. Hiking four to five days a week, I ran into wild turkeys, white-tailed deer, and grouse, not to mention copperheads, rattlesnakes, and black bears.

One week persistent rain put me behind schedule. To catch up, I tried to visit three study sites in one day. On the way to the third site I ran into a black bear that had sat motionless as I approached. As I rounded a bend in the trail he erupted into a mass of gallping paws kicking up the forest floor. Luckily for me he ran away from me and not toward me, but he didn't go very far into the brush.

I could have gone past him to my destination, but it was getting late. I'd have to pass this same point on the way back, in near-darkness, alone. I might not be so lucky then. Though I was almost to the study site and I needed badly to get caught up, I thought better of it, turned around, and hiked back to the jeep.

That was in 1993. At that time, no one had ever been killed by a bear in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That changed in 2001, when 50 year old Glenda Ann Bradley, a schoolteacher from Cosby, Tennessee, was killed by a black bear in the Elkmont section of the park.

Everyone was surprised by a black bear attack. Bear attacks in North America are almost exclusively the province of grizzly bears like the one that killed Treadwell.

It was also a grizzly bear that attacked my friend Tyson. (UPDATE: I recalled it as a grizzly, but it was a black bear. ) Tyson and I were best friends in high school and roommates in college. One summer between college terms he took an Outward Bound class on the Boundary Waters in Canada. The bear attacked without provocation and wouldn't let go. Other people in his group had to beat the bear with canoe paddles to get him to stop the attack. Because they were in a remote area of the backcountry it took 24 hours to evacuate him to a hospital. The bear had torn into his shoulder and mouthed his head, cutting a path in his scalp with one of his incisors. Tyson lived, and several operations later was back in good health and joking that he had "bearly" made it.

That same bear attacked someone else the next day. As with Tyson, the bear wouldn't let go, and had to be beaten back with canoe paddles. UPDATE: The Bounday Waters Journal has an extensive report on the 1987 attacks.

There are competing metaphors for wild nature, from the Bible's benevolent Garden of Eden to Tennyson's concept of "nature, red in tooth and claw." John Stuart Mill once remarked, "If there are any marks of all special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals."

I've worked in nature centers before, and in my experience they struck a healthy balance between assuaging irrational fears on the one hand, and giving good advice on avoiding dangerous animals on the other. For the fringe of the modern ecology movement, that isn't good enough. Their politics are heavily invested in the concept of man as the only destructive being, willful or otherwise, and facts be damned.

For vivid accounts of what happens when people underestimate nature, read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless, an Emory graduate who set out to Alaska to find adventure (and, one suspects, to prove himself), but who died alone in the wilderness. For a history of missing persons in the Smokies, I highly recommend Dwight McCarter's Lost!

Timothy Treadwell was Technical Advisor on Disney's Brother Bear

Timothy Treadwell was the environmental activist who was convinced that bears weren't really dangerous, and kept believing that right up to the moment that a bear killed him and his girlfriend.

Treadwell found kindred spirits at Disney, another outfit that specializes in anthropomorphizing wild animals. Mary Steyn reveals that Disney hired Treadwell as one of the technical directors for their new movie, Brother Bear. Now instead of the Berenstein Bears, we get Steyn on Bears:

Timothy Treadwell would have appreciated the story. Just as Kenai woke up to find himself trapped inside a bear, so did Mr Treadwell find himself trapped inside a bear � though in his case he was just passing through. ... You�d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter at the fate of the eco-warrior, but it does make Brother Bear somewhat harder to swallow than its technical advisor evidently was.

In the movie, Kenai's brother was killed by a bear, and Kenai sets out to avenge him. New agers can probably convince themselves that ultimately the bear attack was caused by man - in the form of Kenai's brother, or logging, or hunting, or some other human event. If only man were properly respectful of mother Gaia, these things wouldn't happen.

With this world view, new age eco-worshippers show their theological sophistication to be on the same level as snake handlers.

Treadwell Documentary "Grizzly Man" Opens Today

I noticed that these two old posts on Timothy Treadwell were suddenly getting comments again. It turns out that Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog's documentary about Timothy Treadwell, opened today. Treadwell was the person who Bambi-fied grizzly bears in his personal life and works. He and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by grizzly bears two years ago in Alaska, forcing the park service to kill the bears involved.

National Geographic has a clear-eyed look at Treadwell and the dangers of his soft-headed, grandstanding approach to wild animals, both for humans and for the wild animals.

The movie is largely based on Treadwell's own videotapes. Treadwell's video camera was on when Treadwell was attacked by the bear. The lens cap wasn't removed, however, so only audio of the attack is available. According to this review the documentary shows director Werner Herzog listening to the audiotape. Herzog then asks the tape's guardian to destroy it. The audience never hears the tape, which reportedly records Treadwell screaming and begging his girlfriend to hit the bear with a pan.

See also:
- Bear and Big Cat Attacks
- Timothy Treadwell was Technical Advisor on Disney's Brother Bear (includes comments from people who saw Grizzly Man at film festivals)

Review of "Grizzly Man"

Emilia Liz Murphy posted a review of the documentary about Timothy Treadwell in this thread.

Leonardo DiCaprio May Play Timothy Treadwell

From a comment today on this post I discovered that Leonardo DiCaprio plans to play Timothy Treadwell in a movie production tentatively titled The Man Who Loved Grizzlies:

Leonardo's production company, Appian Way, has teamed with Columbia Pictures to produce the biopic about Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist who was fatally mauled by the bears he wanted to protect. DiCaprio, who supported Treadwell's charities, will take on the role of Treadwell, who was a man Leo has long admired for his insistence on viewing wild animals as natural friends rather than potential predators. Co-execs on the project are Matt Tolmach and Shannon Gaulding. DiCaprio and Simpson will produce, with Zeman and Barnz as executive producers. Jewel Palovak, co-founder of Treadwell's educational foundation, Grizzly People, will also serve in a producing capacity.

DiCaprio's film The Aviator covered the life of aviation pioneer Howard Hughes. That film did a good job of illustrating Hughes' legendary mental decline. However, it tended to explain it in terms of Hughes enemies (such as the Senator played by Alan Alda), rather than organic mental illness, prolonged drug addiction to heroin and codeine, or the late stage effects of syphillis, which Hughes is known to have had. Will the Treadwell movie be any more revealing?

Audiences are naturally sympathetic to the person whose point of view is presented, and moreso when that person is played by a popular, handsome actor. I can only imagine how Treadwell will be romanticized, despite he and his girlfriend having been killed and eaten by a grizzly bear, and thus proving the "potential predator" side of the debate to be the correct one. Treadwell's life and death proved a lesson, namely, that treating wild omnivores as cuddly stuffed animals is a fatal mistake, and that an unarmed man is not the top of the natural food chain in Alaska. If history is any guide it's almost certain Hollywood will devise its own pretty but misguided lesson for ticketbuyers who want to treat wild nature as a faraway land of make believe, giving the nod to beauty over truth.

Previous:
- Treadwell Documentary "Grizzly Man" Opens Today
- Timothy Treadwell was Technical Advisor on Disney's Brother Bear
- Bear and Big Cat Attacks

"Grizzly Man" on Discovery Channel Tonight

I've been inundated with comments on Timothy Treadwell, and I realized why. The Discovery Channel is showing Werner Herzog's Timothy Treadwell documentary, Grizzly Man. There are two showings tonight, at 8:00 and 11:00 PM Eastern. I've got it set to record on TiVo.

When I was checking out at Blockbuster last weekend I noticed that the DVD was out, too.