Where the Bear Walks: From Fear to Understanding

Of all the creatures on earth, bears are among the most revered and the most feared. Once numbering in the hundreds of thousands, grizzlies in North America were systematically driven to near extinction in a mass persecution fueled by fear and exaggerated stories. That paranoia has remained in one form or another to this day, lurking in the minds of backcountry travelers and haunting the wooded slopes of our National Parks. Now with the catastrophic loss of the Yellowstone grizzly's most vital food source, the battle lines are being re-drawn as the hungry animals encroach on human habitations in search of protein. With public fears escalating, drastic and unsound decisions are being made to reduce the population of a species with one of the slowest reproductive rates of any creature on the planet. Profiled in this book are the efforts of a special few who, daring to get closer to these animals than anyone else, are working to show that bears are not the malicious killers of horror stories and that, in order to save them, we must first understand them.