When we feel like we are always struggling to introduce a new paradigm of research and a better understanding of black bears, we constantly run into a morass of subjective opinion. People are slow to give up their long-held beliefs about this demonized animal, especially those whose reputations and livelihoods depend on adherence to the old beliefs. We have kept open minds about bear behavior for all these decades, trying to understand how bears think. We don’t know it all of course, which is why we keep on, but we couldn’t do what we do, and couldn’t do it for so many years, if we were that wrong.
We tried to find the words to say it is important to keep an open mind and follow the data, not old fear-based beliefs. Then we saw how Jonathan Fields says it. We wish we could write like him. For now, here’s a link to his thoughts about creative research. http://www.jonathanfields.com/blog/judgment-be-damned/
With all the resistance to new ideas, and all the bears that are killed because of the old ideas, we think education is the place to put our efforts in addition to research. Education can mean that encounters with bears have good outcomes for people and bears with fewer bears shot unnecessarily. Education can mean that people will allow bears to walk through their yards without feeling like they have to shoot the ‘menace’ unnecessarily. Education can mean that people realize all that bears are and rally against keeping them in small cages to extract bile fluid and rally against cruel training for dancing or being subjected to bear-baiting (being attacked by packs of dogs for sport).
We think education can get the biggest bang for the buck locally and worldwide. We hope the Education Outreach program that teachers are developing can reach a lot of young people. The book the group put together entitled North American Bear Center Education Outreach Program is mind-blowing. It is about 200 pages of teaching ideas, service learning ideas, interdisciplinary ideas (using bears to teach science, language arts, math, and art), and about 165 pages of lesson plans and resources.
Along that line, but a distant second to the Education Outreach book, we think the Bear Tales book that dozens of you contributed to will be a good bedtime story book. The stories are short, interesting, and are about real people and real bears—not stories exaggerated to make bears appear one way or another. It is edited and ready to publish somehow. We’re looking for the best way to publish it at this point.
Lucky and Honey are settling in and sleeping peacefully with no sounds of tension. We guess Honey knew what she was doing after all.
Northern Lights Wildlife Society needs a boost to get back into second place. It’s one vote a day for today, tomorrow, and the next day to get them back into second at http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf11449.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center