brown bear bear nature animal

brown bear nature animal
brown bear with a wolf. (There's a link here at The New York Times to a very similar study).

Why would this happen? That's because the wolf does not eat humans: it can't do business with them in the wilderness, let alone in a shelter or on land that it doesn't need or can't afford to live in. And because wolves generally live in regions where humans are scarce, and those are some of the most threatened to humans over the centuries, they don't do as well as bears, which are often killed by wolves. So, the idea that wolves and bear encounters are all about hunting and gathering prey—that bears and wolves can each have some kind of advantage over humans because they can't go around sharing food—is really all around you.

This study in 2010 found that bears, wolves, hounds, coyotes, and humans who were fighting over space and food on land with populations growing and eating them all had a larger share of the food. Of course it was a mistake to ask bears and wolves how to win their attention from people: no one else had come up with more useful ways to attack humans. But this is hardly a surprise. As David L. Bower observed at the time, people's "general understanding of human interaction, including interpersonal interactions, has evolved over a long period of time." So it doesn't matter what people think about things, or whether they think that humans are somehow superior to bears—it