I came across two black bears sitting in their rumps facing each other in a pool in the river. We all saw each other. I stopped on a gravel bank upriver and wanted to walk past. They were about 50 yards away, just chillin. Nope. Not moving. Then my hiking companions came around behind me and I saw two black bear backsides heading for the hills.
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When incidents like this happen and the authorities try to find the bear to kill or relocate it, how do they know when theyâve found the right one?
thatâs what I was thinking. I feel like this would be a âgoodâ way to go. hard to say, due to the abject terror involved, but it surely beats the hell out of arteriosclerosis.
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âŚwhich excludes all of Australia. The only big people-eaters that come on land are the crocs, and even those are restricted to the far-northern tropical areas.
Thereâs plenty of stuff to kill you in the south, but itâs all of the small and venomous variety. The only predatory big mammals are people.
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If not, there will be. Weâve got a few German speakers here, they can knock you one up 
Paging @zathras and @FFabian! Call for you at the translation desk!
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Presumably it helps if they decide to anyway, as you can throw it at them and be lighter on your feet for the ârunning like fuck from the bearâ gambit. Having never lived anywhere with animals more dangerous than bullocks and/or particularly ornery goats, Iâd probably just turn to jelly and get eaten.
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Challenge accepted.
Tough one, thatâs more complex grammar than I can squeeze into a word. My first attempt:
Pointenwiedererkennungsmoment
Literally, âpunch line again-recognition momentâ, so the momen when someone recognizes a punch line they know from before.
I didnât manage to fit in the fact that weâre talking about a news story, though.
I might also claim that this news story has a high Pointenwiedererkennungswert (punch line recognition value). This I am more likely to actually use because âWiedererkennungswertâ is already a real word with a dictionary entry, not an ad-hoc formation.
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BecauseâŚitâs not their front door? Iâm not trying to be intentionally crass or Machiavellian, but EVERYTHING on this planet belongs to humans, and humans alone, for better or worse. An animalâs habitat will remain so, so long as itâs not detrimental to us, in one way or another, and no longer.
Take these guysâŚ
They were another indigenous predator that used to roam over a lot of North America, but they, unfortunately, got in the way of progress.
Conversations about environmentalism and animal rights are done through the prism of human sentimentality. For example, thereâs a conversation here about the tragedy of killing a single bear, when we systematically and cruelly kill pigs by the millions. Your âfront doorâ almost certainly used to belong to something else before it was stolen and handed over to you. It might have been a wolf.
Humans will encroach upon a bearâs territory because itâs really NOT their territory. Itâs ours. We just let the bears live there. If you want to reverse that mentality, we have a gigantic metric fuckton of hypocrisy to work out in our daily lives. There shouldnât be anything particularly special about bears compared to species X.
Those scenes are there for our pleasure, which is why theyâre protected and havenât been turned into Verizon stores. We have a selfish interest in keeping them nice, for our photo albums, all while paying lipservice to wildlife (and continuing to have brunch and generally destroy the rest of the planet). We all seem to have a lot of selective outrage when it comes to animal rights, which mainly seems built around how much human drama is embedded in the situation at hand.
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Bits of mountain biker in its stool?
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Disagreements on that point are usually worked out in the following fashion:
- Bear eats person and has a fatty snack that is not nearly as filling, but much easier to catch than an elk
- Human gets lucky enough to kill bear and make a rug out of him.
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Iâve ridden off-rode alot, and on my well-tuned race bike or trainer, on even partially groomed single track, I was near silent.
Pleasant in a large city park or a NORBA race track where you know there are hundreds of racers/spectators in the woods with you,
but out in actual bush you should make noise. And if you canât see a long way, shouts of âClear!â are polite, understood, and if proper, frequent enough that a bear would know Man has entered the forest.
This stuffâll happen sometimes anyway tho
(You should always announce yourself thus ina city park too, wherever you donât have good LOS and are moving quickly)
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As a cynical person I read this and think, âdamn, you are one cynical person.â
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You can call it cynicism, but itâs not too far off from why the National Park Service was founded.
When signing the bill, in 1916, that ushered in the NPS, Woodrow Wilson said the entire point was âto conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.â
National parks, since their inception, have been here primarily for the benefit of humans. Ugly or useful places, perhaps with less likable animals, donât get shit.
For exampleâŚjust look at the AppalachiansâŚyou know⌠another place bears live. Anyone with a functioning brain can discern that mountaintop removal is absolutely fucking awful for the environment, but the nation collectively shrugged itâs shoulders and went back to watching Netflix, instead of mounting any kind of real opposition to the practice. Meanwhile hundreds of mountains get fucking destroyed. So much for the environment.
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Last weekend, a fella was camping in Millard Campground just outside Altadena, CA, and got mauled by a 120-pound black bear. The bear was soon caught and euthanized. And Millard Campground isnât particularly remote.
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Black bears are actually doing very well. So sighting them in non-remote areas shouldnât be too surprising.
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Oh, itâs not surprising. We frequently hear of them splashing around in swimming pools in Chatsworth. I suspect the drought helps bring them to suburbia looking for food & drink.
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Nice way to contradict yourself! How does anything âbelongâ to humans? Can this be demonstrated empirically, or might this simply be some self-serving notion which some humans choose to believe because they find it convenient? I know which seems more probable to me. It does not require any sentimentality especially. One could just as easily say that it is sentimental of humans to presume that they are better than bears. The notion of humans having custody of the planet and all other life was an edict of the Abrahamic religions. I donât subscribe to it, and consider it ecologically naive.
No other animals have ever been able to survive by depopulating their environment of every kind but themselves. No evidence has been presented as of yet why/how humans function as any sort of exception to this. Organisms live amongst other organisms, rather than in isolation, or they die.
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I wasnât arguing that everything should belong to humans, just that it does. A thing is as it is. I would have to be arguing in favor of my first statement to have contradicted myself.
For example I could say that âgun ownership is a legal right in the United States, for better or worseâ
andâŚ
âHuman being shouldnât need weapons to kill each otherâ
This isnât a contradiction. No abstract concept can be proven empirically, so your question is obviously rhetorical.
Iâm all for having a debate around what kind of dominion human beings should have over the planet, but thatâs a very different conversation as to how, exactly, we are manifesting power over our environment, currently. Like I said, currently Glacier National Park is a wildlife reserve protected for the benefit of human sightseers.
Weâd have to have some kind of agreed upon consensus, changing that status, before we start blaming people for being places they shouldnât have been OR saying others shouldnât be there either.
Based upon what? Even if all humans agreed upon this, they would still comprise a minority. It is fine to argue for consensus, but I am skeptical that a consensus between humans would be compelling for anybody else, the vast majority of non-humans.
It is not contradictory in itself, but it there is no way to support how a group of organisms unilaterally choose to define their relationship with others. Demonstrating its lack of empirical basis can reveal its lack of presumed universality, that it may or not be actual, applicable, or actionable in all situations and circumstances. And it can be empirically demonstrated that humans living apart from all other species is biologically untenable, regardless of popular opinion.[quote=âGrim_Beefer, post:58, topic:80725â]
Iâm all for having a debate around what kind of dominion human beings should have over the planet, but thatâs a very different conversation as to how, exactly, we are manifesting power over our environment, currently.
[/quote]
I am not sure that it might be a different conversation. Humans asserting that they âmanifest power overâ their environment is itself problematic, because this posits them as a superset of it. If humans are a subset of this environment, which seems easy to demonstrate, then it seems more probable that they exist with many interdependencies. A superset categorically affects you more than you affect it. But what is arguably humans greatest strength - symbolic reasoning - becomes a possibly fatal weakness here. Being able to use abstractions such as economics to act upon the delusion that one can destroy their environment without destroying themselves does not make that relationship actual. Never mind my skepticism about whether or not âdominionâ represents a real concept, it sounds like the problem of an organism rather than an ecology.
I disagree. People strive for consensus because it would seem simpler if there was a single accepted way to do things. I consider it dubious that there is any such consensus now. Even an apparently real consensus based upon unsustainably misunderstood relationships has no future to it. It seems more probable to me that the pretense of there being such a consensus is largely the cause of the problem.
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Coincidentally explaining the scarcity of both grizzly bears and you in Switzerland.
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