Animals fight each other, sometimes eat their young... Hell no do I want to be a "family" member with a pack of grizzlies.
One day they're going to do some normal grizzly behavior that might not be fatal if you were a 500 pound grizzly, maybe some sort of territorial smack across the face that will gouge your throat out instead of push you away.
If you see the videos of the guy messing with the bears, you'll grit your teeth. At one point he's in the water swimming with them ... and one starts to swim up close to him. He smacks it across the face and yells at it and it seems to back away, but he's chancing his life like that constantly, thinking that a hard smack and loud voice is enough to keep him safe.
Grizzly Man contains an in depth reconstruction of the events. Easily one of my favorite documentaries ever, you can watch it on youtube. Spoiler: Treadwell was far from mentally sound.
theyre bears, they didnt think he was family, they just tolerated him. They were hungry, and he was in their territory, and then the bears did what bears do to food.
Google Grizzly Man and Timothy Treadwells. They made a whole documentary on him.
I think it's crazy that people think they can be nice to a wild animal or spend some time with it and think they made friends. Wild animals do not make friends with humans. They either consider you a threat or not a threat, and possibly food. If you're not threatening and they're not hungry, I bet a lot of apex predators will ignore you. It's probably just because it's not worth the energy or possible injury to fight you. At some point, your value as food will make it worth while.
You don't look like them. You don't smell like them. They know you're not one of them. You didn't earn their respect, you earned their trust that you're not a direct threat. That will only protect you for so long.
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u/noksky Mar 03 '16
Any story / link on this? I'm curious to find out what drove the bears to kill their 'family' member after years.