The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

"I know it!" he responded, "I know it! But Col. Anderson won't let me: He says that if we did, some people would make a great fuss about it; and I suppose they would." Recently, however, it has been found imperatively necessary to teach the Park grizzlies a few lessons on the sanctity of a sanctuary, and the rights of man. We will now record a few cases that serve to illustrate the mental traits of bears. Case I. The Steel Panel. Two huge male Alaskan brown bears, Ivan and Admiral, lived in adjoining yards. The partition between them consisted of panels of steel. The upper panels were of heavy bar iron. The bottom panels, each four feet high and six feet long, were of flat steel bars woven into a basket pattern. The ends of these flat bars had been passed through narrow slots in the heavy steel frame, and firmly clinched. We would have said that no land animal smaller than an elephant could pull out one of those panels. By some strange aberration in management, one day it chanced that Admiral's grizzly bear wife was introduced for a brief space into Ivan's den. Immediately Admiral went into a rage, on the ground that his constitutional rights had been infringed. At once he set to work to recover his stolen companion. He began to test those partition panels, one by one. Finally he found the one that seemed to him least powerful, and he at once set to work to tear it out of its frame.