XII 



THE MENTAL AND MORAL TRAITS OF BEARS 



CONSIDERED as a group, the bears of the world are 

 supremely interesting animals. In fact, no group 

 surpasses them save the Order Primates, and it requires 

 the enrollment of all the apes, baboons and monkeys to ac- 

 compUsh it. 



From sunrise to sunrise a bear is an animal of original 

 thought and vigorous enterprise. Put a normal bear in any 

 new situation that you please, he will try to make himself master 

 of it. Use any new or strange material that you please, of 

 wood, metal, stone or concrete, and he will cheerfully set out to 

 find its weakest points and destroy it. If one board in a waH 

 happens to be of wood a little softer than its fellows, with 

 wonderful quickness and precision he will locate it. To tear 

 his way out of an ordinary wooden cage he asks nothing better 

 than a good crack or a soft knot as a starting point. 



Let him who thinks that all animals are mere machines of 

 heredity and nothing more, take upon himself the task of col- 

 lecting, yarding, housing and KEEPING a collection of thirty 

 bears from all over the world, representing from ten to fifteen 

 species. In a very short time the believer in bear knowledge 

 by inheritance only, will begin to see evidences of new thought. 



In spite of our best calculations, in twenty-two years and 

 a total of about seventy bears, we have had three bear escapes. 

 The species involved were an Indian sloth bear, an American 

 black bear and a Himalayan black bear. The troublesome 

 three laboriously invented processes by which, supported by 

 surpassing acrobatics, they were able to circumvent our over- 

 hanging bars. 



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