A bear is what a bear is. But also, a bear is whatever humans say it is. To a human, a bear might be a comic bumbler, a horror-movie villain, or a noble savage; often, the bear is an emotional crutch, existing largely to reassure the hunter of his own strength, or the environmental activist of their own morality. And when people project their cultural biases onto a bear or a bear population, they invariably cause unintentional changes to the actual animals. Sometimes, as in Grafton, those changes boomerang back onto the people who indulged the most reckless expressions of their own
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