It's Not the Arrow, It's the Indian

This is a black bear. Cute, ain’t he? I was listening to the radio this morning to a man talking about his encounter with a bear. The bear mauled him, and he needed 54 stitches in his leg after the ordeal. At the end of the interview, he said “now I want everyone to remember that there are good bears out there, this bear was a bad bear but most of them are good”. I thought, wow, I wonder if this guy really thinks that. And then I remembered that Disney movies have been giving wild animals charming human personalities for so long now that a grown man actually might believe that. That, my friends, is one of the stupidest comments even spoken by a human being. There are no “good” or “bad” wild animals. Wild animals have no concept of good or bad. The only animals on the planet that think like humans, are… drumroll please… you guessed it, humans. Wild animals have instinct. They react to their environment in the way their instincts tell them to. They do the things that allowed their ancestors to survive and reproduce. It’s funny how the same folks that are so infatuated with Darwin’s theory don’t understand it at all. The bear doesn’t feel what he did was wrong, he has no remorse for his actions, and wasn’t acting out of malice for the guy he attacked. He was doing what bears do. To the bear, it was a fight or flight situation. He decided to fight. Even we don’t really know, when FOF kicks in, which one we will choose. Neither do bears. This guy said the bear he ran into was a bad bear, but in reality, he was just a bear. Would a different bear have acted differently than the bear he ran into? Quite possibly. But would a different guy have made it through an encounter with the same bear unscathed? Just as possibly. Wild animals are unpredictable. That’s why we came up with the word “wild”. Domesticated animals are a bit different. They have evolved, at least to some extent, to co-exist with humans and even completely rely on humans in some cases. But wild animals are unpredictable. They are trying to survive in an environment that is dangerous. It’s an unforgiving world out there in the wilderness, and wild animals do whatever they need to do to survive. Do yourself a favor and forget everything Disney taught you when you go into the forest.