Does This Fence Make My Grizzly Bear Look Fat?

Doing the usual rounds post early-season snow, Squirrel Eating Jon noted the local grizzlies being quite particular about where they crossed the barbed-wire fences that truss our rural world up like a holiday roast.

This fella approached the usual fence-crossing point, stopped and had a look, then turned off and followed south to a place where the gap was more spacious (the smaller tracks are coyote):

This one did the same thing this A:M. Made an approach, did an appraisal, followed the fence some and crossed here. It was still a tight squeeze, mind-you, and it lost some hair, now in Squirrel-Eating’s annual midden of hair samples to be sent for DNA testing:

Then the great beast continued east towards the river, photo below. Jon wonders, are they following our example and getting too fat for their own good? No. Quite unlike us, there is no such thing as too-fat for a bear. Not this time of year.

Take measure of the landscape in the photo meanwhile – does it look like “grizzly country” in your mind’s eye? Not in ours. Like the thriving of the Amish a century and more into the catastrophe that the techno-industrial era has proven to be by the metrics that matter most to us longer-term, it is nothing short of a miracle that we still have grizzly bears walking the earth at all. Let alone in landscapes like this one. Make no mistake, they are only here because we allow it. Given that the goal in the county where this scene was to be observed this A:M, in keeping with the goal of humanity the world-over, is to keep on with the Growth TM fetish at all and any cost, keep cramming-in the human numbers, keep inflating the taxbase by piling-on evermore of our busy little money-beaver bodies, given this and nevermind our capricious consumer natures, we better enjoy the situation whilst it lasts. The conflict of interests between those who think they want bears and those who want the status-quo to an ever increasing exponent (not infrequently the same people) is immense. Only a fatally infantilized culture could believe this set of values can be made compatible for any real duration. Either we collapse first, all growth halting, reversing – and that process is well underway for us now – or the bears will. Any progress they’ve made recovering lost ground will be erased.

These cubs (or is that Mom at bottom-right?) are of the set of three belonging to a gorgeous coffee-dark sow Squirrel-Eating Jon encountered one fairly recent morning (Mom made a brief feint in his direction upon spotting him, before moving on) that were trapped shortly thereafter and packed-off to points unknown for the crime of killing a single steer at a local feedlot that serves-up a 24/7, 365 day-a-year open-air bear smorgasbord with legal impunity in a zone that purports to be bear-friendly. Nonetheless, it’s one strike and you are out for these bears. Such relocations rarely work out for them. At least we have learned that a single steer is worth not one, but FOUR grizzly bears to our culture. What with we human beings and our livestock now accounting for an estimated 96% of global mammalian biomass.