What did Timothy Treadwell do wrong after years of close contact with bears (to have been killed by one)?

I’ll chip in. Treadwell was lucky. What he did wrong was run into a hungry bear that needed a good feed before hibernating.

As Herzog points out, Treadwell seemed not to understand that bears are predators; they are not teddy bears. I speculate had he been 50 pounds lighter, his experiment of life among the grizzlies would have run out a good 10 years earlier.

What kept Treadwell alive as long as he lived was that bears are ominivores - they are only potentially the most fearsome carnivore on the planet; that’s quite different to the polar bear, with whom they occasionally mate. A wild animal of Treadwell’s size is generally more trouble than it is worth to the Kodiak bear. A wild animal Treadwell’s size would surely have injured the bear fighting back.

Bears are not boxers. They indeed want to eat you, but they won’t risk injury over something as trivial as a meal. The largest animal a Kodiak bear eats habitually is a salmon. A wolf of Treadwell’s size? No bear wants anything to do with that That’s not what they are made to eat. Contrast that with the Siberian Tiger that shares the range of the Russian Brown Bear across the Strait; there’s your northern hunter.

Conversely, if Treadwell had been, say, a 500-pound man of Olympic-level strength, he also would have died sooner, but this time as a threat.

Bears are not obligate carnivore+predators like Siberian Tigers, who would have eaten Treadwell in week 2 of the experiment. Treadwell’s sole defense was moxie; and give the man his due. Although he spoke in a high-pitched voice that was boundlessly affected, he had balls. As did his companion.

What saddens me about Treadwell was that there are about 3,500 Kodiak bears on planet earth and 5–6 billion humans. He as good as killed the bear that ate him. He as good as taught that bear that humans are not like wolves, wolverines, elk (or chimps).

He wanted to protect the bears, and he as good as killed one. A man-eating bear must be destroyed. And he created that man eater.

Relative to its weight, a human is the perfect meal for an aging bear that is living on the edge of its last year - the bear that got Treadwell and his companion had been tagged. It was about a 28 year old male, where the Alaska Department of Fish & Game lists 27 as the oldest male Kodiak Bear on record. However formidable looking, this bear was likely too old and infirm to hunt much. That’s why this bear was still out scrounging a meal so late in the season. This is a desparately hungry animal.

If we must say what he did wrong, we must say he also pushed his luck at the very worst time of the year. And Treadwell knew that older bears are the most dangerous. But Treadwell seems to have imagined that the bears shared a bond with him; as one person in the film says “he thought he was playing with people in bear suits”.

Somehow I think had Treadwell known the bear’s condition he would have said and thought something like, ‘oh your poor old guy - I love you; don’t give up grampa!”. He wanted to protect the bears, and he as good as killed one. A man-eating bear must be destroyed. And he created that man eater.

The great difference between Treadwell and, say, a chimp was that a chimp would give the bear a nasty injury in its own defense. But you would have a hard time finding a man who could, through force, turn a bear attack back.

Humans have great athletic powers as endurance hunters. But we can not stop a Kodiak bear; that’s an animal built to survive sabre-toothed tigers, for the love of god.

In the documentary, Treadwell says the bears are misunderstood. They are not.

The bears misunderstand; they think 200 pound humans are on par with other 200 pound animals in the injuries they can inflict in self-defense.

I think the documentary “Grizzly Man” is a tremendous work of art; and a powerful conclusion is that for all his loveof the bears, Treadwell did not respect them for what they are: unsentimental.

The foxes in the film do seem to have liked Treadwell, which will have fed into his dilusion that he had a spiritual bond with animals that eat their own young when they are hungry.

Read other related questions on Quora:

• What do animal conservationists think of Timothy Treadwell? ...Or people in general...?
• If a bear were to kill you, would it also eat you?
• Which animals would be able to kill a polar bear?

Read more answers on Quora.

from Quora http://ift.tt/2jaebTS