Sharing the planet with humans has been bad for bears. Admittedly, that could be said of most other creatures, apart from bacteria. But bears had a particularly hard time because they looked like men – or so early men thought. For most of human history, Bernd Brunner points out in this engrossing study of ursine lore, the great apes were unknown in the northern hemisphere, so bears were the only animals, apart from men, that walked upright. This, together with their great strength, meant that they aroused a special mixture of fear, affection and reverence. They were given human names such as “grandfather” or “little uncle”, and hunting them had a unique, sacred importance. Among some north American Indians it was usual to apologise to a bear after killing it, or assure it that some other hunter was responsible, to prevent its spirit seeking revenge. In eastern Siberia, bears were led from house to house and treated like guests, then slaughtered. The Inuits surrounded polar bears with a complicated system of taboos and rituals. Ainu women, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, kept bear cubs as pets and suckled them. It seems clear that if Darwin had proposed that we were descended from bears rather than monkeys his theory would have had an altogether more enthusiastic reception.

Whereas ambivalence about bears is lodged deep in our ancestral psyche, bears have no interest in us and do not wish to be friendly. For that matter, they have little interest in other bears. The mating season lasts about two weeks, and they spend the rest of their lives alone. It seems agreed that they cannot be tamed, though Brunner cites some remarkable exceptions. In 19th-century America, an eccentric loner known as Grizzly Adams used to capture bears for menageries and would sleep with two cubs to keep him warm. In later life, he moved to New York and walked down Broadway each morning with assorted bears, a drummer and a piccolo player. “Taming” bears has usually meant training them, by cruelty, to engage in what look like human activities (dancing when made to stand on a hot floor, for example) and they are always likely to revert to wildness. A 1930s tamer called Alfred Cosmy had a large polar bear that was trained to kiss him at the end of each act. One day he startled it by stumbling over a can and it instantly killed him. More recently, the environmentalist Timothy Treadwell claimed to have a special kinship with grizzlies, and went to Alaska each season to fraternise with them until, in 2003, one killed and ate him and his girlfriend. An audio recording survives, which cuts off in the middle of her frenzied screaming. Both Cosmy and Treadwell seem to have assumed that bears would recognise and respond to human signs of affection, whereas the bear’s expressive repertoire is quite different and seems limited. It roars when angry, emits a “modulated humming sound” when licking its paws, and the females pop their lips in the mating season to indicate sexual longing. Apart from that, their language remains mysterious.

What to do when meeting a bear is, consequently, a problem, and the best plan is not to. According to Brunner, the golden rule with grizzlies is to avoid taking them by surprise, which sounds excellent advice, though hard to follow. Should you disturb one by mistake, “resisting the impulse to flee is vital”. If it stands in front of you and roars, Brunner recommends lying down and keeping absolutely still. Praying that it is not hungry might also help. Throughout history, the terror bears inspire has motivated numerous extermination programmes. By AD1000 they were extinct in Britain, and in Germany and Switzerland by the end of the 19th century. The introduction of repeating rifles meant that many of America’s thriving bear populations (in Texas, California, Utah and Arizona) had been wiped out by the 1930s. The wisest policy for bears is to stay undiscovered. Pandas were unheard of in the West until 1869, when a French missionary saw a panda pelt in Beijing. European hunters rapidly converged on central Sichuan, and a dead panda became a coveted trophy. President Theodore Roosevelt’s two sons mounted their own expedition and found a sleepy old male panda sauntering among bamboos, which they promptly blasted into oblivion. A gentle creature, it uttered no sound, even when shot. It was put on show, stuffed, in the Chicago Museum of Natural History.

Roosevelt himself was a keen bear hunter, which makes it, according to your viewpoint, appropriate or ironic or disgusting that he should have given his name to the stuffed replica that we thrust into our children’s innocent hands as an obligatory part of their cultural conditioning. It was a cartoon showing Roosevelt on a bear hunt, published in The Washington Post in November 1902, that inspired a Brooklyn couple, the Michtoms, to make a toy bear from cloth, filled with sawdust, and market it, with Roosevelt’s permission, as a Teddy. So our tradition of sentimentalised humanoid bears – Winnie-the-Pooh, Rupert, Paddington – took root at roughly the same time that bears were becoming an endangered species. The cruelties meted out to real, as opposed to stuffed bears, notably in Thailand, Vietnam and China, where they are kept in tiny cages and “milked” for their spleen through a tube inserted into their gall bladder, prompts the thought that saving bears from extinction might not be a good idea. We pride ourselves on conserving wild life as if it were for wild life’s benefit. But it seems possible that some species, including bears, might, if consulted, simply prefer not to remain on earth with us.

Brunner’s otherwise richly informative book rather skimps the literary evidence. He notes that bears feature as seducers of women in the folk tales of many cultures, and that in Snow White and Rose Red, one of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, a bear turns into a handsome prince and marries a beautiful damsel. But bear-men in folk literature are heroic as well as sexually powerful. Being fond of honey, the bear was and is a notorious destroyer of beehives, so it became known as “bee-wolf”, which is where bear-man and epic-hero Beowulf got his name. The story of the Three Bears and their porridge also goes unmentioned by Brunner. The poet Robert Southey seems to have made it up, but it has often been retold and, under the influence of the teddy-bear cult, versions in which Goldilocks is scared away, or even killed, have been replaced by happy endings. However, Brunner’s omissions reveal what a fascinating region he has found to explore. He shows that our special relationship with bears, which exists only in our imagination, and which bears have done nothing to encourage, has been, since prehistoric times, the site of some of our deepest fears and wishes. The recent adventures of a bear in Sudan suggest the conceptual hinterland between bears and people is still a dangerous place to stray into.

BEARS: A Brief History by Bernd Brunner, translated by Lori Lantz
Yale £16.99 pp260

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