An Animal That Looks Like A Man

A keeper that I knew once said of the rescued black bears that she cared for, "Sometimes they remind me of people wearing bear costumes who are supposed to act like animals, but keep forgetting."  Maybe she was inspired to make that meme. Who knows, maybe she was the inspiration behind it?

There is something undeniably human about bears, and we as a species have acknowledged it for centuries.  You can read legends about bears from places as different as western Europe, the Canadian subarctic, and the foothills of the Andes and find a lot of stories which are nearly identical.  A classic version, shared among several peoples, tells of a bear who abducted a human woman to be his wife.  She bore him sons who were human but who inherited magic powers from their father.

Something I've noticed over the years is that in many parts of the world where you find bears, you don't find apes or large primates.  None in North America, Europe, or northern Asia.  South America has monkeys aplenty, but not so many where the Andean bears roam, and there are no great apes, gibbons, baboons, or macaques in South America anyway.  Only when you get into southern Asia do bears and big primates really start to overlap.  

Why does this matter?  It means that in many parts of the world, the bear is the animal that our ancestors would have identified as the most human-like creature that they shared their landscape with.  Think about it.  Bears and humans are roughly similar sizes.  Humans walk on their two legs - bears are one of the few large mammals that can also do that.  Early humans sheltered in caves.  So did bears.  We don't have tails.  Neither do they.  We tend to eat the same stuff, we lived in the same places, we both can manipulate objects with our hands/front paws.  Skinned of its pelt, a dead bear looks quite a bit like a person.  If you never saw a chimp or a gorilla, you might very well believe that a bear was our closest relative.

I think that really sums up our affinity for bears so much.  There are few other animals which occupy such a huge role in our minds, in which they can be seen as both fearsome and dangerous (bear attacks are a constant source of drama in outdoor adventure movies) yet still so lovable (Teddy Bears, Care Bears, Berenstain Bears, Paddington, Corduroy, etc).  It explains to me that, when humans first started keeping wild animals in zoos - not for food, or for companionship, but just because they wanted to be close to an animal - they started with bears.  It also explains to me why, when we look for an endangered species to rally around in the name of saving the earth, whether its as the mascot of the World Wildlife Fund or the symbol of global climate change, we turned to bears.