How are there so many videos, etc. of people interacting with bears peacefully even though they aren’t domesticated?
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Bears will only kill you if they’re crabby or hungry or you’re messing with their children.
Other than that, they’re usually peaceful.
*Most* animals are fine to interact with 90% of the time. It’s just that you can’t tell if they’ll suddenly change their mind without knowing a lot of the body language of that animal.
survivor bias.
getting killed while taking a bear selfie makes it difficult to post the video later.
Most people have never spent much time around large animals. They have no idea just what they are capable of. Even domesticated animals are dangerous under the right conditions. Horses will bite and kick ( and have killed people). Bulls are incredible dangerous. Sows with pigs will attack, and billies are the original bullies.
I highly recommend you watch the movie/documentary called “The Grizzly Man” he lived together with bears for many years before ultimately being killed by one (along with his girlfriend iirc). He was actually very intelligent in a lot of ways and had a whole system in place to make sure interacting with the bears in the wild was as safe as possible. Unfortunately it just takes one screw up to end up like him.
They’re not domesticated, but they can be *tamed*. With conditioning and training, an individual from almost any species can be made reasonably human-tolerant and probably safe to interact with, especially if it was born in captivity and has known humans its whole life. (The difference between that and domestication is a question of hundreds to thousands of generations of selective breeding specifically for human tolerance, which changes them on a much deeper level.) People can and do have pet lions, tigers, and bears all around the world, or work in animal sanctuaries to help take care of them.
The whole problem, of course, is that if you wind up on the wrong side of “probably safe” with something the size of a bear, it can take your head off as easily as it would scratch its ass. Hell, a huge predator like that can kill you by *accident* by playing a little too enthusiastically. Which is why they’re illegal to keep as pets in most places, and also why a lot of the ones you see in photos and videos with people on the internet will have had their teeth and claws surgically removed, and possibly been sedated for the photo op as well.
Bears are not territorial so they don’t react negatively to strangers at first contact.
Territorial animals would consider you as an intruder.
If they are not hungry on a hunt or protecting cubs or their food sources, they would be timid, but not aggressive
You don’t kill every smaller animal you encounter. Why would a bear? Bears are dangerous to us because they’re so big and powerful that they’re capable of easily killing us. That doesn’t mean they go around wanting to kill us.
Part of the problem with bears is that people have the idea that if it’s not trying to kill me right now then it must be as safe as a domestic animal. So they put themselves in a bad situation.
This is why “anecdotal evidence is not evidence”.
In a world with billions of people and hundreds of thousands of bears, there are going to be thousands of bear-human encounters every year. And given that people are people, there are likely to be at least a few tens of them trying to get up close and personal with a bear. And since we live in an age where everything can be recorded, most of those encounters will probably make it onto the internet.
Not every person interacting with a bear is going to wind up mauled. In fact being mammals the bear might be just as friendly and curious as you are. But it might try to maul you instead. If you only take the videos of people interacting peacefully into account, you have no way of knowing the actual statistical likelihood of a bear petting turning into a mauling.
The only way to test this scientifically is to get a few thousand randomly-selected people together and have each of them seek out a wild bear and try to pet it while being recorded, and record the results. This will give you a more accurate measurement of how likely a bear encounter is likely to result in you dying. However it will also likely result in a lot of people getting killed, which is why you generally don’t see statistics like this.
This is the norm. It’s the relatively rare bear attacks that get the news coverage.
Same with sharks.
Mind you, the penalty for triggering either one is severe.
Ears are very smart creatures. If you keep them well fed, the chances of them turning you into shredded cheese is slow. They’re wild animals so there’s always a chance for that to happen.
You have to respect their boundaries and territory.
Black bear is easiest to interact with and easiest to scare off.
Brown bears – not easy to interact with. You gotta play dead with these ones. Once they see you’re not a threat they move on.
Polar bears – you’re dead. They eat anything they come in contact with.
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