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.