Let Them Be Eaten by Bears by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

Author:Peter Brown Hoffmeister [Hoffmeister, Peter Brown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101622599
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Polar Bears Don’t Engage in Religious Wars

Kids and parents ask me about bears, cougars, and moose. And as dangerous as the possibility of animal attacks seem (some of those animals are large and all of them are strong), I tell the kids that we’re safer because we’re away from other humans. Humans are by far the most dangerous animals on earth. Humans kill more than a million humans each year, worldwide. Humans kill other humans out of envy, anger, fear, misunderstanding, sorrow, disgust, indignation, cruelty, pride, surprise, and political or religious differences.

Humans kill one million humans per year. If you think about it, that’s pretty weird on an animal level. Have you ever seen a Sunni cougar kill a Shiite cougar? What about a Catholic grizzly murdering a Protestant grizzly? What about a gun-toting, border-guarding, Tea Party moose? Or a Green Party, letter-bombing, terrorist bobcat?

Nope, that’s just us. Just humans. We’re that weird. We’re weird enough that we even kill ourselves. I know that I’m getting way out on an uncomfortably thin ice sheet at the middle of a mountain lake in late spring, but I have to point out that muskrats don’t hang themselves from their own ceiling fans, which makes me wonder, how screwed up have we gotten as a species?

So get away from cars and the very strange and creepy human beings, and suddenly you’ve erased quite a bit of danger. And if we’re going to get away from cars and humans and become safer, we may as well have some fun. We may as well raft and swim rivers, climb rocks, climb trees, mountaineer, canoe, backpack, orienteer, practice survival situations, fly-fish, bait fish, mountain bike, street bike, urban hike, and study weather.

Survival

We can train or retrain. This can be mental or physical or both. We can anticipate struggles and train to be adaptive and capable. This is where survival comes in, but first we have to define the concept of survival and take a step back.

I’m often asked if survival is relevant. Do we need survival anymore?

Well, that depends on what kind of survival we’re teaching. Is it faux-survival showmanship, à la TV reality shows? Is it for a reality show and does it involve urinating on a shirt and wrapping that urine-soaked shirt on my head? Does it involve baiting an Egyptian cobra into striking my water bottle? Or jumping into a snow-fat river to travel downstream quickly before it gets dark (never mind that the last thing a person wants to do in a survival situation is get into cold water just before nightfall)? Well, if it’s TV-style survival we’re teaching, incorrect survival, ridiculous made-for-television posturing, then the answer is no. We don’t need to learn survival. That kind of survival learning is totally unnecessary in today’s society.

But if we’re teaching survival that applies to both the wilderness and society, survival that applies to stress in general, then survival will always be relevant. Mental preparation and acuity. The ability to sit down and think when everything in us wants to run.

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