Simon Barnes writes about bears:
Thousands of years before Western civilisation knew about gorillas and chimpanzees, we had a wild creature that could stand and even walk upright, one that looked like an old man in eccentric undergarments with paws like gloved hands. Bears even eat much as do human beings: omnivorous, with a liking for meat and a pronounced sweet tooth.
All that made bears a conduit between humans and the rest of nature. Bears told humans that there was not a gulf between us and our fellow mammals: rather, that some kind of continuum existed. As a result, bears have been loved, hated, venerated and tormented for millennia. And still it goes on.
Bears stand for our love for the wild world: and our fear of it. They stand for our kinship with other species: and our rejection of any such thing. Wherever bears are, we find conflict: conflict for space, conflicting ways of life — and profound conflict in the human mind.
No conflict here though: Kamchatka bears at English Russia.
Mick Hartley 
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