Bears Hardly any other animal causes as much fear, as many emotions as the brown bear. Think of the Bavarian “Bruno”, the first bear that had been seen in the Austrian-Bavarian Alps for over 170 years, that had to die although he had never threatened a human being in any way. A couple of chickens and sheep are all that he was responsible for. Could it be that our approach to keeping animals is unnatural? My wife and I have travelled for years through Alaska and spent weeks at a time in a small tent camping out with the bears. We spent a lot of time in Katmai National Park at the base of the Alaskan peninsula, without a doubt one of the areas with the highest concentration of bears. We quickly discovered that a lot of our ingrained perceptions in reality simply didn’t apply. I’ll take a closer look at our experience and the behaviour of these bears in another section of my home page.