Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America by Jon Mooallem Page B

It was as if a switch had flipped. Before 1990, the predominant image in the newspaper was of an “elusive and fascinating wild creature.” After 1990, cougars were “efficient four-legged killers” and baby-snatchers, “roaming like phantoms” in the nearby hills.
    The same shift has been happening with wolves lately, especially since Republican legislators maneuvered via a last-minute budget amendment to take away the gray wolf’s federal protection in several states in 2011. (Conservationists defended the wolf as part of America’s natural majesty; Montana’s governor, meanwhile, told his constituents to forget the Endangered Species Act altogether and take matters into their own hands: “If there is a dang wolf in your corral attacking your pregnant cow, shoot that wolf. And if its pals are in the corral, shoot them, too,” he told Reuters.) And a decade after Wolch’s cougar study, similar research looked at newspaper editorials about a proposed black bear hunt in New Jersey and found almost exactly the same scenario: bears being cast both as “menacing threats” and as “God’s creatures” who would gladly “live in peace” if people just left them alone.
    When Roosevelt refused to shoot that black bear in Mississippi in 1902, the species’ larger cousin, the grizzly, was being brutally eradicated around the country. And as it disappeared from the land, it found new prestige in our imaginations. Soon a novel by James Oliver Curwood, called
The Grizzly King: A Romance of the Wild,
would turn on a scene that is almost exactly the opposite of what happened on the president’s bear hunt. A grizzly named Thor stalks the hunter who has previously shot and wounded him. The bear creeps in behind the hunter, trapping him between a rock wall and a cliff, with nowhere to run—and unarmed. Thor towers over the man angrily, but then pauses, stunned by how “shrinking, harmless and terrified” the creature that had hurt him looked now. And so the animal slowly turns and disappears in the direction from which he’d come, leaving the hunter standing there—letting him live.
    The bear was now the merciful one, with a code of honor he refused to break. The hunter was the senseless killer. As Seton once wrote, “No animal will give up its whole life seeking revenge; that kind of mind is found in man alone. The brute creation seeks for peace.” The bear was the bigger man.
    —
    I T DIDN’T TAKE LONG after Roosevelt’s bear hunt in 1902 for the teddy bear to become a full-blown craze. By the end of the decade, Steiff was producing close to a million teddy bears a year. Sets of teddy-bear clothes were sold separately, and
Ladies’ Home Journal
published patterns for making your own. Your teddy bear could wear pajamas or dress up like a sailor or a fireman. There were even special blankets and caps to keep the toys toasty in winter. That is, despite all its fur, the bear needed a winter coat. In the natural history of the teddy bear, this seems to be the point at which the teddy bear splintered into its own discrete species, when it completely broke away in our imaginations from its relative in the forest.
    But the toy confused adults. Their children were trading in dainty baby dolls for beasts—it was troubling. “From all quarters of the globe,” wrote the
Washington Post,
“comes the demand for Teddy bears, with poor Miss Dolly gazing woefully out of her wide open eyes powerless to prevent the slipping away of her power.” The
New York Times
published a poem: “The Passing of the Doll.” The teddy bear seemed like a novelty—a fad—and everyone assumed it would be forgotten once Roosevelt left office. Mass-manufactured toys themselves were still fairly new, and so, as the inauguration of Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, approached in 1909, the toy industry was hungry to ramp up production of America’s next cuddly plaything—whatever it might be.
    That January, President-elect Taft was