“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

sign next to where we were. So the bear doesn't move far from its kill. So you know that
one is there, so you weren't going to get eaten unless you, you know. But bears aren't
dangerous unless you, but they're not just killing machines. And people tell you stories
like, here I was and I got in front of the bear and its cubs and the bear just left me alone.
And in another mood – gone. But the people who live near animals, any kind of animals,
horses, wild horses say, they make at least some effort – not all of them, but many do – to
understand them. The people who antagonize bears in north western Canada are the
idiots who come driving in from the cities, to try and take pictures of bears, or whatever
they do. Hunting. Actually sometimes, I saw an amazing piece of footage of some tourists
trapped- a family, between black bears, a mother and family it was-, and they were trying
to take photographs with them with tripods and the mother got, hang on, what are they
doing? Well she tried to frighten them. She wasn't violent, actually. She did mock charges
and everything, to drive them away, because she felt threatened for her cubs. And these
people are complete idiots, but they weren't locals as locals would say, locals will have a
lot to say to you about bush whacking for example, that's a way you might disturb them,
ok. My policy might be if you disturb a bear that's your problem, right? But of course
that's not the enlightened thing because as soon as one person disturbs a bear, and
something happens to them because of their stupidity, that changes the way bears are
understood. People say bears are dangerous, let's go and kill them all. There are people
who will just shoot at bears when they see them. Think they're doing everybody a favour.
But the people who live that, who actually live in that world, understand that balance
between the bear community, and the lynx, and the cougar community, all the animal
communities, mean that they can live there and enjoy that place as long as they respect the
other animals living there.
OV: is that something about – to come back to the Fair Chase – the hunter there is
obviously part of this
JB: yeah, but hunting there was a sort of metaphor for – it's quite interesting because the
previous book I'd done was called the Hunt in the Forest, and the central metaphor all the
way through was hunting, that's all kinds of hunting – hunting animals, hunting other
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