Since the prehistoric origins of human culture thousands of years
ago, when humans still lived in harmony with God's creation, bears have
been a fellow creature admired, loved, empathized, mysticized,
spiritualized, deified, anthropomorphized, revered and worshipped as kin
and supernatural being that shared the Earth with man. Many ancient
cultures, from the native Americans to ancient Europeans felt some form
of reverence or kinship with the great bear.
But unfortunately, in more recent history, as man gradually changed
his way of living from a hunter-gatherer in harmony with nature to a
sedentary agrarian farmer and city dweller that saw nature as an enemy,
bears have been feared, hated, denigrated, maligned, exploited,
desecrated, persecuted and massacred by humans to get them out of the
way of our sprawling civilization or even merely for taking sick
pleasure in their endless suffering and death.
And sadly, many modern humans, especially those in Western
"civilization" have grown to denigrate and subordinate bears and all of
nature as a force below man, an evil, wild, savage force that man must
"civilize" and "tame".
With the rise of Western "civilization", bears have been slaughtered
in all lands to the point where entire species, subspecies and
populations of their kind have been wiped from the earth forever, and so
much of the bear spirit's rightful place on Earth has been ravaged and
desolated. The bear species and populations that remain to this day are
much smaller than they once were, and far removed from much of their
former territorial range, and their remaining habitats are becoming more
despoiled and fragmented, and are still shrinking at a steady rate.
Sport hunting and other human-related causes have become almost the sole
cause of early death for almost all bears, and in most populations a
bear will never get to live a full life or experience their natural
average lifespan of up to 30 years.
For the past 4,000 years, accompanying the rise and fall of numerous
great civilizations, Eurasian man’s relationship with bears and with
all of nature has only been cruel and destructive. There is no justice
or reasoning for Eurasian man’s wanton destruction of a once
paradisiacal pristine Earth and for his ungratefulness to God for the
honor of living among such wondrous creatures on such a rare and
beautiful oasis of a planet.
It can only reasoned his mindset is, in every sense of the word,
insane. And man's current insanity could easily be his very undoing
along with the undoing of every good thing that God hath made on this
Earth if man does not grow up and learn to respect God and his wondrous
natural creation.
But there is much hope. Where bears still remain, countless people
and organizations are today working hard to educate people to
understand, appreciate and respect the bears they share their lands
with, and important steps are being made in many areas to both save
bears from extinction and liberate them from man's cruelty. Misleading
myths and baseless fears people have of bears is being broken down as
people see the truth and begin to gain a respect and admiration for
these remarkably intelligent and magnificent mammals.
The future of bears and the grand majesty of nature that they
represent is in our hands.
If humanity can learn to mature and advance, and be cured of its
insanity and lose its enmity towards God and his natural creation, all
life will be blessed, including ours.
We must learn to abandon the egocentric manifest mindset of our
shameful forefathers that hated and denigrated God's creation, and learn
to renew the love and spiritual kinship of our superior, ancient
ancestors that loved and revered bears, mother nature, and all things
under God.
Can we renew our ancient kinship with bears?
