I Live with Two Grizzly Bears | Beast Buddies

When you have bears, there's no vacation. These are wild animals. They are apex carnivores, and they rule the roost. I've had an interest in bears since I was a boy. I never thought I'd get a bear. Thirty years ago, I'd been sick, had a neurological disease, was paralyzed at a young age, and when I got back on my feet and I had this opportunity to get a bear, I thought, you know, this will be my therapy. I'll hang out with it in the woods. And that's how it all began. I started off with one bear, Brody. He would take nine half-gallon calf bottles at a time. Started off at eight pounds. At a year old, he was 400 pounds. A year and a half, he was 550 pounds. So I bottle-fed him for three years. When you raise a bear, you become the surrogate mother, and they won't leave your side. They go through a lot of separation anxiety. This is a lot like a human being. Definitely when they're young, they see you as their mother. I clearly remember the first time I realized that a bear isn't a dog. It was a 60-pound bear cub. That may sound silly, but most people think that if they take a wild animal and they love it and they treat it just right, that somehow they will get it to surrender its natural instincts, and that'll never happen. You can never tame a bear. You can train one, but you can never tame one. The two bears I currently have are Bob and Screech. They're littermate brothers, around seven years of age, and they came from a park in Georgia. It was a tourist attraction, and they went out of business. Prior to going out of business, a friend of mine had called me and said, hey, they've got a couple bear cubs they don't want. I didn't pay for them. They were given to me. People ask me if I rescued them, and to me that's kind of an overplayed word. I took them. I've raised them, and I've loved them, and I try to give them the best life that you can give a captive bear. When I started handling bears, it was just to interact with them, nothing commercial, but I realized it's going to take a lot of money to facilitate this hobby, so I tried to marriage a hobby with a profession. I started doing commercial work, TV shows, live appearances. You want to play? Want to play? And it evolved into the educational presentations where the animal itself can benefit and people can benefit, so I can hopefully save the lives of people and of bears, and that's where I'm at now. No bear likes to be surprised, but if you surprise a brown bear, and they perceive that as possibly you being a threat to themselves, they're young, they're a food source, and oftentimes these guys try to kill you because they're trying to eliminate that perceived threat. That's why they tell you to play dead if you're out in the backcountry and you're attacked by a brown bear. I've always been reluctant to tell people that they are pets because they don't meet the traditional definition of a pet. Most people don't have pets that can kill them, but it comes with the territory. These are wild animals. They are apex carnivores, and they rule the roost. The main thing when you have them in captivity is to keep them from being bored. You know, you see the neurotic behavior, the pacing, what they call stereotypy in zoos oftentimes. These guys have a lot in this habitat. That's one thing we don't want. We don't want pacing. We don't want them going nuts. I feel my main focus right now with Bob and Screech is to use them to educate people on how to behave in bear country to save the lives of people and of bears. As habitat is shrinking, there's less area for the bears. My main focus is just trying to keep people alive and keep bears alive. When you have bears, they take up all your time. There's no vacations. I've had bears 30 years, and you're always thinking of, you know, whether it's getting food, building new enclosures. There's no downtime. This isn't an animal that's a low-maintenance animal. I worked on a program called Project Grizzly. I was trying to take Bob and Screech to captive-born, captive-raised bears to see if it was possible to release them into the wild. The problem with a bear in the wild is if it loses its fear of people and becomes habituated, or if it associates people with food and becomes food-conditioned, it's usually marked for death. The question was, can you take these captive-born animals and make them afraid of people and get them to stay away from people? And the experts that we had involved, some said that unless you use aversive conditioning with pain, like oftentimes they'll use water bullets and rubber bullets and pepper spray and bear dogs and lots of different things to just make them scared to death of human beings, but I wouldn't do it. My bears are well cared for and protected, but what we pretty much determined was unless you implement that type of aversive conditioning, you're not going to get these guys to fear humans. You're a good boy. You've got mud all over your claws. I love them, but I watch them. Good boy. To make sure that I keep my mind where it should be, knowing that these animals, I wouldn't say would turn on me. Turning on me, in my opinion, would be coming out of the left field. A bear attacking me for absolutely no reason. Can't put your finger on it whatsoever. But I know darn good and well if I go in there with a hamburger, I better bring it up for the whole class, or I'm going to get hurt. There's no surprises to that. People ask me, what does the future hold for Bob and Screech? I've made arrangements, if something were to happen to me, that they could go somewhere. But their future at this time is just to stay with me. I know some people would think that that's not healthy for them, but once they build a bond with somebody, it's kind of hard to break that bond.