Animals: Last of the Brownies?

Going the way of the buffaloes are the great bears of America. California, onetime home of the great grizzly, has none left. Neighboring Oregon is said to have one, Washington five. Alaska, last refuge of the grizzly and the even greater Kadiak brown bear may soon be as bearless as California. Reason: next week (July 1) all restrictions on bear killing will be lifted. This piece of territorial legislation was backed by salmon packers who claimed depletion of streams; sheepmen who pointed to deaths in their flocks; farmers who said the bears menace human life.

American sportsmen deplore Alaska’s action. Famed Stewart Edward White has categorically denied the charges against the Kadiak bear or ”brownie.” Of the death of John Thayer, an assistant in the Forest Service, whose death precipitated the legislative action, Mr. White wrote in the Saturday Evening Post: ”The victim was green to the beasts and turned loose on the first one he saw, wounded it just sufficiently to make it pugnacious. Then when the bear charged, the poor fellow stood stockstill and unresisting, until the bear pounced upon him.”

Bears, like most wild animals, may be frightened away by a noise. Bears will fight only when they think they are cornered. Correct procedure for an unarmed man grounded by an unwounded bear is to lie still. The bear will cuff and bite only as ong as his victim resists. Alaskans tell the story of a woman, attacked by a bear, who fainted, received not a scratch.

Sportsman White denied that bears are responsible for the depletion of Alaska’s salmon streams. His reasoning: Bears “must always have eaten as many salmon as they do today. . . . There was no depletion even after we came along, as long as we fished reasonably.”

The fact that bears migrate from mountains to river valleys each year for their annual salmon gorge almost insures their extermination if their enemies set systematically about the task. Says Sportsman White: “If I were so inclined, I think I could shoot almost every bear on any given river in a week and thus clean out a habitat of hundreds of square miles.”

When the fish are running, the “brownies” wade into the shallows, bash the fish with their paws. When the churned water becomes calm they stick their snoots in the water, extract their fish.

Editor Harry McGuire, writing in the current issue of Outdoor Life, places most of the blame for the new law on sheepmen, charges them with attempting “to get free grazing land.” He concludes: “The more I see sheepmen, the better I like bears.”