Bear With Me: Dan Horowitz and Human/Bear Interactions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BEAR WITH ME: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF FAMOUS BEARS (2025)

By Daniel Horowitz

Duke University Press, 209 pages.

★★★★ ½

 

I was watching a movie a few nights ago when I got a warning from my neighborhood listserv that a large potentially dangerous bear had been seen in my neighborhood. I get these regularly and tend to ignore them. What am I supposed to do, lasso it? Besides, Massachusetts has black bears and I’m only in danger if I’m a blueberry bush or if I’m stupid enough to get between a sow and her cubs. Your encyclopedia of choice will tell you that black bears are omnivores, but that just means that an emaciated one might resort to eating road kill. If that’s me, they’re welcome to have a nibble.

 

Understanding how humans perceive bears has been done with more panache by Smith College professor emeritus Dan Horowitz in his newest book Bear With Me. To state bias upfront, Dan is a friend and former colleague. Among the things I admire about him is that he takes popular culture seriously. After all, a solid case could be made that popular culture is American culture. He wants to explore why bears are probably the most represented animal in our culture.  Some–white and brown bears like the polar, Grizzly, and Kodiak–are indeed potentially deadly. But is popular culture to blame for dangerous encounters?  Yesterday, I saw a little girl in a park hugging her Teddy Bear. I hope that her parents have taught her that Teddy is make-believe but wild bears should never be touched.

 

Horowitz opens with “Folkloric Bears and Actual Ones.” Is the lesson of Goldilocks that bears can harm you, or merely that you shouldn’t intrude upon the property of others? Horowitz draws upon global folklore wends his way into African- American tales to highlight the ambiguity: American culture doesn’t send clear distinctions between folkloric and humorous bears from “actual” ursids. How many colleges have friendly bear mascots? What do we do with Brer Bear, Garfield’s Pooky Bear, or Yogi Bear? Fat Bear Week videos from Alaska’s Katmai region give us bears snatching salmon from the air as if they are Joey Chestnut-like competitive eaters. Horowitz follows with tales of Hugh Glass, Grizzly Adams, and Timothy Treadwell to underscore the potential fury of bears, though he speculates that bears can be linked to Manifest Destiny, a manly conquest of obstacles embedded in the wild.

 

In chapter four he returns to children, specifically tales in which bears are personified: the Three Bears, Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington Bear, Care Bears, and the Berenstain Bears. (The latter provide an opportunity to look at backdoor antisemitism.) His dissection of Grizzly Adams again sounds an alarm. The TV series and Adams’ penchant for giving bears human names gloss reality:  “Adams forgot that he was James Capen Adams and [the bears] were not Ben Franklin or Lady Washington but rather wild bears he apparently both loved and violently trained.” In 1858, one captive bear bit through Adams’ skull and into his brain. This ultimately proved fatal.

 

Horowitz often uses the word “domination” when it comes to human/bear interactions. He makes it explicit in “Captive Bears and Their Captors as Workers,” which looks at bruins in zoos, circuses, on TV, and in films and video games. Changing mores have sparked debates over whether captive animals are being denied their natural roles. This may seem obvious, but saying so has also empowered defenders of capture practices. Mark Dumas claims to have domesticated a polar bear; others have “rescued” cubs to “teach” them how to be wild. Horowitz does not use the word “enslavement,” but he implies it. He further pinpoint sthe central dichotomy between bears as veritable monsters– “Cocaine Bear,” for instance–versus “cuddly,” friendly bears. Horowitz takes a deeper dive on Teddy Bears and Smokey the Bear, each of whom has appeared as cuddly and scary. Are bears racialized? His comparison of bears to golliwogs deserves serious contemplation.

 

Although I understand why he went there, his separate chapter on bears and gay subcultures is cursory and could have been reworked and folded into his final chapter on “bears, humans, and dangerous eroticism.” But Horowitz is spot on to make the plight of Arctic polar bears his coda. This intriguing book will please both scholars for its meticulous documentation, and general readers, who will debate his vivid examples.

 

Rob Weir