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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.
As late as the 11th century, there were Western aristocrats who boasted of their descent from bears. A 12th-century bestiary noted tenderly that bears “do not love each other as other four-footed creatures do, but rather embrace and mate in the same manner as men and women”. There has always been a whiff of eroticism in the quasi-human status of bears.
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All the same, they have been chased out of existence in much of Europe. The last British bears were wiped out a thousand years ago. Last year, when a bear strayed from Italy into Germany (during the World Cup) it made all the television channels and was then shot — to widespread outrage and relief.
Bears abound in stories, at once loveable and terrible. No child's life is complete without a teddy. At the beginning of the last century the stuffed toy bear was invented in Germany and taken up in a big way in America, largely because Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt was so fond of killing them.
A teddy bear is half wild, half child, with a flattened face, enlarged eyes, and short, rounded limbs like a human baby. Every night-time cuddle is an atavistic reaching out into our wilder past and a deep longing for the exotic and the wild: but all that is combined with an equally deep need for security and safety. Teddies and wild grizzlies are equally contradictory beasts.
Many of us grew up with bears. Winnie-the-Pooh is a bear and a poet, a creature of powerful affections and profundity of soul, composer of gnomic rhymes (including the koan-like Cottleston Pie), yet prone to terrible muddle and error, being a bear of very little brain much bothered by long words.
Paddington came from Darkest Peru and created havoc throughout Hampstead, close-fisted, with a taste for antiques and marmalade. A bear who inspired affection in all around him. Despite — or because of — his penchant for mayhem, Paddington was always an inadvertent destroyer of the civilised world.
I have a special affection for old Baloo, Mowgli's teacher in The Jungle Book. He was inevitably turned into an idiot by Walt Disney, but in the books he is the most learned creature in the jungle, wise, affectionate, pedantic and, when roused, capable of extraordinary violence.
All these ursine contradictions are an ineluctable part of the human condition. The panda — certainly a bear, for all its many peculiarities — has become a symbol of the fragility of the world and its wildlife. It is the logo of the WWF, a banner bearing a vegetarian bear under which that organisation rightly wages war on those who wish to destroy the wild world.
Meanwhile, California still bears a grizzly bear on its flag, even though bears were wiped out in that state in the early 20th century. The polar bear has become the emblem of global warming; a bear that makes its living on the icecap that is shrinking beneath its paws.
Polar bears weigh 200lb (90.7kg) less than they did 15 years ago because their way of life is becoming less and less viable. We keep finding new ways to destroy our own world: and always, it seems, there is a bear that can make the point more compellingly than any other creature.
The perfectly named Bernd Brunner has put together a wonderful book, a vivid cultural history of interaction between human beings and bears. It is full of glorious period illustrations; a brief but never trivial book that must captivate anyone who has cuddled a teddy or longed for the wild.
It becomes clear that throughout history we have used bears to define who and what we are. Bears provide a strange transitional phase between the tame and the wild, between human and non-human, just as a hibernating bear seems to embody a transition between life and death.
Bears have been a symbol of the fierce and savage world and everything that humans wished to escape from — and yet they were brought into cities so that their ferocity would be admired in bearpits and zoos. Now they are a symbol of the wild world we are destroying, while at the same time they sum up all the fear we still have of everything untamed. Bears R Us: and if we lose the wild bears and the wild places, we shall lose something important in ourselves.
Bears: A Brief History by Bernd Brunner
Yale, £16.99; 260pp
