Essay Berserk bears By John Gathright	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
クマはなぜ凶暴になるのか 人間が動物の生息地を侵略し、一方では温暖化などの環境変化もあって、彼らの存在がますます脅かされている。 われわれは自然と動物の両方にどう向き合うべきなのか、その解決策を見つけるのは容易ではない。

This week I'm going to share a tragic story from American Fork, Utah.

An 11-year-old boy was dragged from his tent in the middle of the night. His family were woken by his screaming, but it was pitch black outside and the boy couldn't be found. They searched frantically, but it wasn't until daylight that they discovered his dead body.

Over the next couple of days, many experts offered their views on why the bear went berserk and killed the boy, and why the number of people killed by bears is on the rise

Some specialists said that bears are intelligent animals and that they are under stress because their habitat and their food sources are threatened by encroaching human kind. Another specialist said that global warming is shortening their hibernation period and making them grumpy, and when they're grumpy, they're more likely to attack. Yet another specialist said that bears like to bite and play with logs and rocks and things, and that the bear might have dragged the screaming boy away for fun.

I have had the opportunity to meet a number of bears in the wild. Black bears usually run away or wait until we have moved away before running away themselves. They are often more scared than we are. I used to work for the Parks and Recreation Department on Vancouver Island, and from my experience there, I don't think bears are either stupid or cruel. But I do know that people can be stupid and cruel, and it was most often the actions of stupid people that make bears go berserk.

But I'm not blaming the 11-year-old boy in Utah. I honestly believe that this was a freak accident, and I feel for the pain and sorrow the family must be suffering now. But I also don't want to blame the bears. In North America, there have only been 49 fatal attacks involving bears between 1900 and 2007. Of those, 29 have been since 1990, which says something strange is indeed taking place.

In the national parks in Canada, I have often heard of people throwing food, rocks and other things at bears. It is also not uncommon for tourists to drive their cars up to a bear and actually try and nudge them with their bumper so they can get a picture of them rearing on their hind legs. It often saddens and surprises me that people can be so cruel and thoughtless.

But human beings have a long history of cruelty toward bears, and not just in terms of hunting. Take, for example, bear baiting, which was common between the 16th and the 19th centuries in England. This is where people watched chained bears being mauled to death by pit bulls for sport. It was such a popular sport that even royalty were invited

Elizabethan writer Robert Laneham described the scene: "It was a sport very pleasant to see, to see the bear, with his pink eyes, tearing after his enemies approach ... and when he was loose to shake his ears twice or thrice with the blood and the slaver hanging about his physiognomy."

Our world is getting smaller and warmer. Nature is on the decline. Animals are going the way of dinosaurs (roughly three species go extinct every hour) and what can we do? We need to change the way we treat nature and the animals in the wild, to find a way to live alongside nature, but there is no easy solution.

Shukan ST: July 6, 2007

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