"You cannot humanize a bear, and you cannot 'de-bearize' a bear. Give bears what they need to carry on their bear lives, and they will, even if what it means to be a bear has lain buried for years."
Whenever zookeeper Else Poulsen met a bear for the first time, she always asked it two things - "Who are you? And what can I do for you?" Those two questions defined her relationship with every bear that she ever worked with. The first sought to understand the life of the bear as an individual, to know what made its story unique compared to all of the other bears that she worked with over her life. The second question took the answer to the first, and then helped her decide how to best give that bear what it needed for a happy, healthy, fulfilling life under her care. Key to both was her understanding that bears were all individuals, and that no two were the same.
Poulsen, who passed away a few years ago, recounts her experiences working with a variety of ursids in her memoir, Smiling Bears: A Zookeeper Explores the Behavior and Emotional Life of Bears. Each chapter is focused around her relationship with an individual bear that she worked with at different zoos throughout her career and how she tried to understand them to meet their needs. The title draws from her unequivocal belief that bears, when happy and content, do really smile. A lot of the keepers that I worked with early in my career would dismiss this as anthropomorphic hogwash. Maybe they just never gave their bears sufficient cause to smile.
The bears that Poulsen cared for all came into her life in different ways. Some were born at other zoos and transferred to ones where she worked. Some were non-releasable wild bears who, after bad behavior on the campgrounds, were faced with the options of the zoo or the lethal injection. And some were confiscations. The bear which Poulsen tells the most moving story about (one that she shared with me earlier on this blog) is of Barle the polar bear, one of the famous Suarez Seven who were confiscated from an abusive Mexican circus. Barle's story is one of rehabilitation and redemption, being taken from what must be one of the least appropriate, most unnatural environments a polar bear could find itself in and being given a chance to do.... well, bear things. Before she died, Barle got to swim, forage, socialize with other bears, and even give birth. Even after her rescue, her story could have been a much sadder one - a bear afflicted with the ursine-equivalent of PTSD, living in neurotic fear of her well-meaning new keepers - if it hadn't been for the loving, expert care that she received.
Bears are tough animals and tend to do "okay" in even the most mediocre of zoo habitats, if by "okay" you mean they eat, stay reasonably healthy, and breed. Their toughness makes them seem aloof and unapproachable. Poulson's book shows us two sides of bears. There is the animal that is sensitive, intelligent, and delicate, shaped by the care that it receives from its keepers. There is also a strong inner bear which, given the chance, will engage in natural behaviors and do its best to... well, be a bear. Poulson bridges the gap between the two, describing how even the most "damaged" of bears (her epilogue deals with bears rescued from the absolute hellscape of bile farms) can, with the right care, reclaim their lives and be bears ago, "to do bear stuff" as she puts it. And a bear that gets to do "bear stuff" will be, almost inevitably, a smiling bear.
Smiling Bear: A Zookeeper Explores the Behavior and Emotional Life of Bears at Amazon.com
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