What the Aesthetic Tastes of Bears Say About People
Adopting wild Russian cubs and a greater-than-human sensibility
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what floored me immediately; pictures of bears sitting down enjoying natural scenery such as vistas and sunsets. They struck me as being a lot like hikers and photographers, spending great effort just to get to sit and stare out at a pretty view. In fact, the evidence tells us it’s the exact same mechanism in us both that leads us to do this. What that tells us about ourselves — our aesthetics, our autonomy, and our identities — could be explosive.
Bears maintain rich and far-reaching social relations. They can like or dislike each other; they can form friend circles and engage in social play; they can have complex social exchanges within loose local communities; older bears can tutor unrelated younger bears in different skills; communities engage in structured relations of kinship and the sharing of resources and defense responsibilities. They stare and paw at their reflections in water for long periods of time. Cubs mourn their dead mothers for weeks.
But first, let us tell some fun stories about bears. In Kamatcha, in the Russian Far East, starting in the mid-1990s, a Canadian couple, artist Maureen Enns and rancher Charlie Russell, lived in a cabin in the…
