Home Life in All Lands—Book III—Animal Friends and Helpers

by Charles Morris

THE DANCING BEAR

You have seen, no doubt, the dancing bears, clumsy, ugly brutes that men lead around the country, visiting the summer resorts, and making the animals go through some awkward movements on their hind legs, which they call dancing.

This is not a sign of any great sense in the bear. To get up on his hind legs is a common habit of this lumbering fellow. Many hunters who have made the bear angry have found this to be the case. When it wants to fight up comes the bear on its hind feet. It is not like a prize fighter, using its fore-legs to spar with; though it can strike a blow that will hurl the strongest man to the ground. But what it tries to do is to get its fore-legs round the man and give him a hug. When a bear hugs, he means business. It is not a tender embrace, but a bone-cracker that few men can stand.

The bear is an easy animal to tame. The common brown bear I mean, not the savage grizzly bear, which no one would think of trying to tame, except when young. When a bear is tamed it shows itself a docile animal that will not hurt any one who treats it well.

As for the learned bears, their learning does not amount to much. It takes no special teaching to get them on their hind legs or to prance around in a clumsy fashion. Yet the bear is not wanting in brain powers. It is really an animal of much intelligence and very teachable.

Grizzly Bear Cub. The Young of all Animals, Even of the Fierce Grizzly, can be Tamed by Kindness

It shows this in various ways. I have told you how the elephant gets hold of a piece of food by blowing back of it with his trunk, and how the monkey does the same thing by throwing his shawl over it and drawing it in. The bear has a way of his own of doing the same thing, as the following anecdote will show:

It is the story of a bear at the Zoo, to which some one threw a bun. The bun fell into the bear's bathing pool, out of his reach. The animal could have got it easily by going into the water, but did not just then want to wet his feet and in his wise head thought out another plan. He put his paw into the water and began stirring it up till he had a sort of current going round the pond. When one leg was tired he put in the other, moving it in the same direction, and kept this up till the bun came swimming round within reach.

There are other stories of the same kind and they go to show that the bear has good thinking powers. He certainly knew that by making a current in the water he could cause the bun to float up within reach of his paws. It is not likely that this bear had ever done the thing before or seen it done, so he had to think it out for himself.

There is a very interesting thing to say about wild animals which will fit in well at this point. As a rule they only want to be let alone, and if man would quit hunting them many of them would become as tame as the cows and sheep in our fields. There is much proof of this, some of it very late proof.

After the Yellowstone National Park was set aside as a national pleasure ground orders were given that none of the wild animals of the park should be shot. You may think that these wild creatures could not find this out, but they soon did. Thus we are told that the elks, the great deer of the mountains, are very alert and timid outside the park boundary, but when they have crossed this and come into the park they grow very bold and independent. They have learned that the crack of the gun which means death on one side of the border is not heard on the other, and have taken in this lesson.

As for the bears, they are fearless of man when inside the park, and come up close to the hotels and other buildings as if they looked upon these as part of their lunch route. It is the same with the other wild animals. They seem to know.

We hear of the same thing from East Africa. No one can shoot at game within a certain distance on each side of the East African Railway. That is the law and the wild beasts have come to know it. Travellers on that road tell us that crowds of wild animals can be seen on both sides of the road, antelopes, zebras, ostriches, deer, and the like, looking with curious eyes as the train goes by but not trying to get away.

This was not the case in the past, when people could shoot at them from the train. No one has posted up a bulletin in beast language telling that a treaty of peace had been signed between man and beast. But there stands the fact. These innocent creatures have lost all their old fear of the railway train. They seem to have told one another.

This is not the case with such dangerous brutes as the lion, the leopard, the hyena and the rhinoceros. These do not come within the terms of the treaty of peace. Travellers are free to shoot at them. As a result you do not see them among the animals that welcome the train.