In the daily grind of a human life, there’s a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way. I mow the lawn of Poa pratensis as if lawns are natural, when in fact we didn’t invent the suburban American lawn until one hundred and sixty years ago. And I drive to soccer practice, even though that was impossible one hundred and sixty years ago—not only because there were no cars, but also because soccer hadn’t been invented. And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s. So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose. So I feel unsettled about the Canada goose—both as a species and as a symbol. In a way, it has become my biggest fear.
The goose isn’t to blame, of course, but still: I can only give Canada geese two stars.
TEDDY BEARS
THE ENGLISH WORD BEAR comes to us from a Germanic root, bero, meaning “the brown one” or “the brown thing.” In some Scandinavian languages, the word for bear derives from the phrase “honey eaters.” Many linguists believe these names are substitutes, created because speaking or writing the actual word for bear was considered taboo. As those in the wizarding world of Harry Potter were taught never to say “Voldemort,” northern Europeans often did not say their actual word for bear, perhaps because it was believed saying the bear’s true name could summon one. In any case, this taboo was so effective that today we are left with only the replacement word for bear—essentially, we call them “You Know Who.”
Even so, we’ve long posed a much greater threat to bears than they have to us. For centuries, Europeans tormented bears in a practice known as bearbaiting. Bears would be chained to a pole and then attacked by dogs until they were injured or killed, or they’d be placed into a ring with a bull for a fight to the death. England’s royals loved this stuff: Henry VIII had a bear pit made at the Palace of Whitehall.
References to bearbaiting even show up in Shakespeare, when Macbeth laments that his enemies “have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course.” This is an especially interesting passage since by Shakespeare’s time, bears had been extinct in Britain for perhaps a thousand years, likely due to overhunting by humans. To fight the course “bear-like” couldn’t refer to bear behaviors in the natural world, only to the violence bears suffered and meted out in a human-choreographed spectacle.
Although plenty of people recognized bearbaiting as a “rude and dirty pastime,” as the diarist John Evelyn put it, the objections to it weren’t usually about animal cruelty. “The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators,” wrote Thomas Babington Macaulay.
It would be inaccurate, then, to claim our dominion over bears is a wholly recent phenomenon. Still, it’s a bit odd that our children now commonly cuddle with a stuffed version of an animal we used to be afraid to call by name.
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Here’s the story of the teddy bear as it is usually told: In November of 1902, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt went bear hunting in Mississippi, which was an extremely Teddy Roosevelt thing to do. The hunting party’s dogs chased a bear for hours before Roosevelt gave up and returned to camp for some lunch.
Roosevelt’s hunting guide that day, a man named Holt Collier, continued to track the bear with his dogs as the president ate lunch. Collier had been born enslaved in Mississippi, and after Emancipation became one of the world’s most accomplished horse riders. （He also killed over three thousand bears in his lifetime.） While Roosevelt was away, Collier’s dogs cornered the bear. Collier blew a bugle to alert the president, but before Roosevelt returned, Collier had to club the bear with a rifle butt because it was mauling one of his dogs.
By the time the president arrived on the scene, the bear was tied to a tree and semiconscious. Roosevelt refused to shoot it, feeling it would be unsportsmanlike. Word of the president’s compassion spread throughout the country, especially after a cartoon in the Washington Post by Clifford Berryman illustrated the event. In the cartoon, the bear is reimagined as an innocent cub with a round face and large eyes looking toward Roosevelt with meek desperation.
Morris and Rose Michtom, Russian immigrants living in Brooklyn, saw that cartoon and were inspired to create a stuffed version of the cartoon cub they called “Teddy’s Bear.” The bear was placed in the window of their candy shop and became an immediate hit. Curiously, a German firm independently produced a similar teddy bear around the same time, and both companies ended up becoming hugely successful. The German manufacturer, Steiff, had been founded a couple decades earlier by Margarete Steiff, and her nephew Richard designed the Steiff teddy bear. By 1907, they were selling nearly a million of them per year. That same year, back in Brooklyn, the Michtoms used their teddy bear sales to found the company Ideal Toys, which went on to manufacture a huge array of popular twentieth-century playthings, from the game Mouse Trap to the Rubik’s Cube.
The typical contemporary teddy bear looks approximately like the 1902 ones did—brown body, dark eyes, a round face, a cute little nose. When I was a kid, a talking teddy bear named Teddy Ruxpin became popular, but what I loved about teddy bears was their silence. They didn’t ask anything of me, or judge me for my emotional outbursts. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my tenth birthday. I retreated to my room after an exhausting party and cuddled up with a teddy bear, but I found that it didn’t really work anymore, that whatever had once soothed me about this soft and silent creature no longer did. I remember thinking that I would never be a kid again, not really, which was the first time I can recall feeling that intense longing for the you to whom you can never return. Sarah Dessen once wrote that home is “not a place, but a moment.” Home is a teddy bear, but only a certain teddy bear at a certain time.
The bears of our imagination have become increasingly sweet and cuddly since the debut of the teddy bear. Winnie-the-Pooh first arrived in 1926; Paddington Bear in 1958. The Care Bears showed up in 1981 as the ultimate unthreatening ursine friends. Characters like Funshine Bear and Love-A-Lot Bear starred in aggressively saccharine picture books with titles like Caring Is What Counts and Your Best Wishes Can Come True.
In the broader world, at least those of us living in cities began to see bears as we thought Roosevelt had seen them—creatures to be pitied and preserved. If I forget to turn off the lights when leaving a room, my daughter will often shout, “Dad, the polar bears!” because she has been taught that minimizing our electricity usage can shrink our carbon footprint and thereby preserve the habitat of polar bears. She’s not afraid of polar bears; she’s afraid of their extinction. The animals that once terrorized us, and that we long terrorized, are now often viewed as weak and vulnerable. The mighty bear has become, like so many creatures on Earth, dependent upon us. Their survival is contingent upon our wisdom and compassion—just as that bear in Mississippi needed Roosevelt to be kind.