For reasons indeterminate I’ve been unable to brain today, and so have been forced to simply proffer news items without adding value. I hope my brain will be in working order tomorrow, but until then you’ll have to be satisified with two bears. First, the National Zoo is about to put its new baby panda, a male appropriately named Bei Bei (see photo below) on display. It’s unbearably cute: I can’t think of another creature as adorable as a juvenile panda. Here Bei Bei, at five months old, waves to the crowd. What would you pay to be the woman holding him?
Here he is as a juvenile. They’re not as cute when they’re newborns, resembling a parti-colored kiwi fruit:
And bear #2, a Kodiak bear named Jimbo, who lives at the Orphaned Wildlife Center in Otisville, New York. (Kodiaks, Ursus arctos middendorffi, constitute an Alaskan subspecies of the grizzly bear.) Jimbo’s 9½ feet tall when he stands up, and weighs a hefty 1500 pounds. But Jimbo’s also friends with Jim Kowalczik, and they play regularly. Here’s a video:
I’m not sure if I’d give a plugged nickel for Kowalczik’s life, but it must be fun while it lasts. . .
h/t: Cindy
Rocky the bear was thought to be the best trained bear in the business, until he killed a handler in 2008:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080423-AP-grizzly-att.html
On the other hand, Doug Seuss had a 23 year friendship with Bart the Bear and continues to work with other grizzlies with great success. Bart was frequently the bear you would see in Hollywood movies. If you want to see some amazing footage of Doug and Bart, go to youtube and search for the Legacy of Bart the Bear. Another video of Doug and Bart that is amazing is the one titled Wrestling A Grizzly Bear in my Garden. Based on what I have seen about Bart and Doug, I would doubt that Rocky was the “best” trained bear.
Compare this to the friendship between Doug Seuss and Bart the Bear. Bart was seen in many movies. Doug now works with a number of other bears. You can see videos of Doug and Bart on youtube or at vitalground(dot)org. I suspect that Rocky was well trained, but he had several handlers and did not have as close a relationship with any one of them. Doug raised Bart and other bears from the time they are very young.
I watched a PBS nature show the other night about friendships between different animal species. They had a dog and a leopard (or maybe it was a cheetah) that were raised together and were good friends, among other odd pairings of species. I used to own a wolf hybrid that was raised as a pup with a cat and, while they did not play together, they lived side by side in harmony. My guess would be that, in some cases, individuals of different species can be friends if they grow up together. Why would that not be true for people and some wild animals?
But, folks who try to become friends with adult wild animals don’t usually have success. A prime example would be Timothy Treadwell who thought he could be friends with wild grizzly bears and instead he and his girlfriend become lunch.
Sorry about the double post. My first post didn’t appear, so I redrafted it.
See also Hercules, the Big Softy, and his owner, wrestler Andy Robin.
Jimbo seems pretty mellow, but I was wondering if Jim was going to get knocked over backwards into the frozen pond.
“(Kodiaks, Ursus arctos middendorffi, constitute an Alaskan subspecies of the grizzly bear.)”
– I am aware of the colloquial usage of ‘grizzly’ as a brown bear in general, regardless of location or actual subspecies. Until quite recently, both Kodiaks and grizzlies were subspecies of the brown bear, the Kodiak is/was not a subspecies of the grizzly, the following is/was the case…
Brown bear – Ursus arctos
Kodiak – Ursus arctos middendorffi
Grizzly – Ursus arctos horribilis
Currently the taxonomy is a mess (horribilis) with some quarters now indeed supplanting brown bear with grizzly as the umbrella term for Ursus arctos variants in N. America. Regardless, the Kodiak remains the largest (just) of all browns worldwide, and the grizzly (U a horribilis, for clarity) is intermediate to large among browns.
This bear is morbidly obese at 1500 lbs and its overall size, not good for a captive animal.
You see these Videos all the time with people cuddling up to Lions, Tigers, Bears, Wolves etc, and I,m thinking they’re WILD animals bro, one of these days……