Welcome to the thunderdome: Bears have no business at Maryville

If you have ever seen the movie “Grizzly Man,” you know firsthand of the madness that accompanies humans when they try to enter the animal world. We are just not meant to do it. I am going to try not to spoil anything, but the story ends up just about like 99 percent of other man goes into animal world stories: the man gets horribly maimed and/or dies. I read about “successful” versions of these stories all the time, and we humans have a weird fetish for it. We want to know that we could go join a bunch of crows and do crow things all day and it will work out well.

Spoiler alert: that’s a bunch of crow.

Part of the reason stems from our antipathy towards stories of people getting killed by wildlife, unless a bunch of people die in a row (then we feel like the wildlife is out to get us, and it’s interesting). “Area man killed my mountain lion” is a brief headline, but “Area man befriends mountain lion” evokes ideas of friendship and joy and happiness and cuteness and man being a creature of acceptable moral hygiene. We are not. Let’s not kid ourselves. We cannot befriend lions. We have no business out in lion land.

And that’s the root of the problem, right there: we have no damn business packing up and going to live with lions. It is madness, and shame on those who do it. They are bad role models for children. The humans are, I mean, but now that I think about it, lions are, too.

Which brings me to my next point: lions have no business in human land. We had our own intruder recently, as you probably know. We had a bear come onto our campus and we even got on the local news: is the threat of bears worrisome to Maryville College students?

Not if they mind their own damn business, they are not.

Side note: of all the things Maryville College students, college students in general, have to worry about, like midterms, alcohol poisoning, rape, the crushing depression that comes with thinking about entering a job market overseen partially by the efficacy of the United States Congress, how to talk to other humans without using the words “my thesis makes me sob uncontrollably at night,” student loans, roommate drama, etc., they think that we’re going to be worried about an effing bear? This is what passes for journalism? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding yourselves?

Back to the crux of it: that bear had no business at Maryville College. It should not have been here. It can’t interpret literature. It can’t take a biology class. It can’t understand the irony behind the previous statement. We ought not to bear arms in bear territory, and they should not have bear arms in human territory. It’s just natural.

What possible business could that bear have in Gibson? “Oh, you see, officer, I was just trying to score a dime bag of honey at 11:00 p.m. on a weekday.” Nope, the bear wouldn’t say that, because you can’t buy honey in Gibson, and bears can’t speak human language, either, nor would they speak to a police officer and potentially incriminate themselves, if we’re continuing on this ridiculous farce of an analogy and assuming that a bear has a higher than average understanding of how Miranda rights work.

None of this matters. It works out for the bears, too. If humans would just allot huge sections of bears and wolves and lions to live and stop frigging messing with them, we would all be happier. I repeat: we have absolutely zero business there. We have no reason. When a human tries to do what our bear-visitor did, it should and does bear bad consequences for the human. But when a bear barely bares his bare bearness at Maryville College (of humans, not bears, our title implies), he forbears his bare freedom. We should blare alarms and cast this bear off. It has no business here.