Charlie Russell spent eleven years in russia’s far east living with and raising grizzly cubs who were orphaned by poachers. The cubs, which were subsequently taken in by a zoo in Petropavlovsk, were about to be shot by their keepers now that they had outgrown their small cages. So charlie built a small cabin in the foothills of the South Kamchatka sanctuary, accessible only by the small plane he built and taught himself to fly, where he raised ten cubs with his partner, Maureen Enns. Together, they earned the trust not only of these bears, but others as well, who would even leave their cubs with them to babysit. Charlie’s years of living with the bears was the culmination of a lifetime spent filming and exploring the realities of the grizzlies in the wild, which began with his childhood in alberta’s rocky mountains. He learned that the bears are not inherently dangerous or unpredictable, but that our fear and distrust of the animal has taught them to fear and distrust us. Bears that are given no reason to fear humans are willing to be friendly, he says, but the culture of hunting has made them aggressive. Sadly, one day in 2003, charlie returned to his cabin expecting to find the bears emerging from hibernation only to discover a bear gal bladder hanging on the wall. Poachers had killed his cubs and sent him a message to counter the one told by his time in kamchatka. “For people to feel good about killing these animals that i find so wonderful, you have to insist they are dangerous and want to hurt us,” he says. in the past 100 years, 91 humans have been killed by grizzly bears. In that same span of time, more than 200,000 grizzly bears have been killed by humans. Charlie Russell is the focus of a PBS nature episode, Walking with giants, a BBC ‘Natural World’ documentary, Bear man of Kamchatka, and The edge of Eden - living with grizzlies
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 08:45:55 +0000
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