It’s been a while since I was impressed by an episode of MonsterQuest, but “Giant Bear Attack” is one of the few I enjoyed recently. Are bears getting larger and more aggressive than in years past? That was the question this episode posed.
My initial thought was no, they’re not getting larger, but I admit to forgetting about the fact that some species of bears are thought to be mating with one another, something not believed to be very common. A photo of a bear taken by a fella who shot a bear shows that bears can be quite large, but that doesn’t mean that the various species’ as a whole are getting larger. It was excellently pointed out by someone on the program that bears within a species vary greatly in size, just as some adult men can be over seven feet tall. We don’t call them monsters, but rather, we send them to the NBA.
I found the first half of the episode or so to be very informative. I don’t watch any documentaries about bears, so I admit that my knowledge about the eight known bear species is rather limited. This proved to be a very valuable episode, informing me of the size and ranges of some of the bear species. It would have been nice if they talked more about the bears found in Asia, but they focused the air time for North American bears for the most part.
I was very disappointed by two portions of the show. One was the skull belonging to a bear that is currently in the Smithsonian. In the dramatizations, the skull was made to appear enormous, but when a scientist was able to see the actual skull at the museum, he was disappointed by the size, suggesting it was actually a young, female brown bear, and not something new.
The second portion of the show which disappointed me was the trip to New Jersey. Some of the residents tried to make it sound like they were living in downtown Manhattan and they were being invaded by large bears when they were clearly in a heavily-wooded area. I can’t for the life of me understand why they are surprised that bears are commonly seen in their neighborhoods.
The U.S. is greatly overpopulated by humans and instead of rebuilding dilapidated parts of towns, we seem to just ignore them, expand the towns further into areas which are more heavily-wooded and inhabited by animals. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that these idiots are seeing bears walking through their backyards. Animals such as bears need lots of room to find food. Bears are getting more aggressive, but it’s only because of us. We’re not only encroaching on their land (temporarily through hunting, fishing, hiking, etc and permanently by building homes), but our reckless use of natural resources is destroying their habitat.
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