They call the monstrosity Cub Palooza. The website tells us It’s the event you’ve been waiting for all year long! A chance not only to personally meet, but to interact with the adorable new baby bear cubs. We might forgive the redundance of baby, but the doubling down on this freshness with new when we all know what cub means is simply a step too far. An excess of language in a place devoid of joy, of calm—for the bears, at least.
We are returning from a weekend in Jackson Hole. The sharp, angular drama of the Grand Tetons long out of our rear-view, we’ve driven through rolling fields preparing for the summer planting season, the last of a long winter of snow melting and flowing into nearby streams and rivers. When we turn off I-20, we follow Bear World Rd. for a mile or so—a county road like one we might see back home in Texas, lined by budding trees and dead grass all beneath an endlessly open sky. As we make a left towards the entrance, I read one of the many signs as we crawl forward: We’re re-inventing the petting zoo! It’s worse than I imagined, and I had envisioned a fairly dark existence of wildlife park dystopia. We pull forward to join the line of cars queued up to enter the drive-thru prison. Though it’s a bear’s world, though they are the star attraction, we see other animals through the chain-link fence: bison, elk, and mule deer all huddled in groups in what minimal shade the acreage affords them. The sun is out in full force on this Sunday in late April. We remain at a standstill for ten minutes or so until a young man opens the gate to another entrance kiosk and I pull our car up to his window.
“Welcome to Yellowstone Bear World!” he says with a chipper smile. What luck, today they’re able to offer us entrance for half-off and a community card to boot for half-off any future visit this season.
“Thank you sooo much,” I say. He asks us where we’re coming from. Salt Lake City.
“Oh, wow he says. How did you hear about us?” I tell him I’m doing research on bears. This is true; I am researching; I am writing; I am trying to figure out what the bear means to me beyond my love for an idea of him. And though this love brings me here, I do, genuinely, long to see a bear, to be near their curious presence—their supposedly kind eyes, their razor-sharp incisors and claws—which is to say, to take part in a gaze that is long-established as problematic and enabled by an economy of cruelty and confinement. It’s also fair to say I’m no impartial visitor here. Having deconstructed the language on the facility’s website with an unmatched pettiness and perused a site maintained by PETA that details the organization’s own sting operation, I don’t have much respect for Bear World, just the captives they hold. Like any other zoo, Bear World illustrates English critic and novelist John Berger’s argument in “Why Look at Animals?”: “The zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and animals; nothing else.” And our relations have not been kind. Berger goes on, “Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” What might I find here beyond a moment of pleasure and excitement, so quickly undercut by my own guilt, my endless shame, and deep sadness for the beautiful beasts on the other side of the chain-link fence?
“Oh, that’s great,” the Bear World employee says. “You’re going to love this.”
I smile, I nod. “Mmmhhhmmm.” He hands us two receipts—one for us and one to hand to the attendant to grant us access to the bear section of the park. We pull forward and turn left into the amuse-bouche of sorts.
Developed by Mike Ferguson on sixty acres of land near Rexburg, Idaho, the drive-through wildlife park skirted state laws through lobbying and exemption from its inception. A local businessman in Rexford, Ferguson began excavating land near the Snake River in 1998.
Problems quickly arose during the construction of the facility, most notably due to its location as part of protected wetlands along the Snake River. Originating in Wyoming, the Snake River is the largest tributary to the Columbia River, which it joins in Washington after arcing across southern Idaho and turning north along the Idaho-Oregon border. An important water source for crops, especially potatoes in Idaho, the river once carried nearly half of the spring chinook salmon (a bear’s dream!) that return to the Columbia basin rivers in Washington. The nonprofit American Rivers, which works towards clean rivers for the benefit of all ecosystems, reminds us on their website that “today, these species are either extinct or threatened with extinction, as the most extensive freshwater salmon habitat in the lower 48 states is upstream of the four dams on the lower Snake.” All this to say, the Snake River wetlands are a critical ecosystem for wildlife and water source for humans, and the Federal Clean Water Act requires permits for any work on these lands. According to a May 5, 1998 article in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News titled “Excavation of protected wetlands stopped at proposed Yellowstone Bear World park,” developers must also not damage the wetlands, and they must create “similar land soil soaked by water and hosting water-loving plants.”
Mike Ferguson did not have any permits for this work, and on April 17, 1998 an official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first asked Ferguson to stop digging in the wetlands. The digging did not stop at that time, and Ferguson claimed he was not told then to cease excavation. By the end of the month, construction had paused, but the majority of the work had already been completed. On May 28 of that year, the Madison County Commissioners voted unanimously to grant Ferguson the permit to continue construction, citing overwhelming local public support for the park. When asked about the process, Ferguson said, “I feel fine about it.”
Bears love their space; they are wanderers. A grizzly might cover 20-to-40 miles a day, with males roaming areas as large as 1,000 square miles and females covering well over 100 square miles. Black bears typically live in a home range of at least 15 square miles. Both grizzlies and black bears tend to be more solitary and individualistic in their meanderings, except when breeding or caring for cubs. While trappers and hunters stalked (and continue to hunt) bears of all kinds for their furs, for profit—a means of possessing a symbol of American wilderness— I wonder if they ever considered the behavior and dream that might have bound them both then and now: rugged individualism.
For humans, rugged individualism is, in fact, a myth. The term, coined by Herbert Hoover in the final campaign speech of his 1928 Presidential campaign, invokes the belief in the “self-made man,” and the speech called for a return to such an ideology after what Hoover believed was an unprecedented escalation in the size of government during the First World War. We are painfully aware that the vast majority of Americans did not survive and do not thrive ruggedly, or individually for that matter, and a “self-made man” is only as successful as the circumstances and privileges he himself is brought into. Then came the Great Depression, his staunch opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and, ultimately, his landslide defeat to FDR in 1932.
Unlike humans, the bear raises her head as the truly rugged individual, the opportunistic omnivore who finds whatever flora or fauna that can sustain her and, potentially, her cubs. That search for sustenance and that drive to survive requires space. From mountain streams and rivers to berry-laden bushes, bears move and search and explore for food, and I hope, for pleasure, too. Have you ever seen a grizzly’s face as she shimmies her back up and down along a sappy conifer? How could that not be a face of ecstatic joy? She makes her presence known. She marks a territory with her scent that a human might claim with a line on a map, a fence, or blood.
I am no animal whisperer, so I cannot claim to know the emotional state of the elk and deer and bison we drive by in the first area of Bear World. But animals do feel, and their behavioral and psychological responses to situations are not that different from those of humans. What I can say as we move forward at a glacial pace on this sweltering day is that these more-than-humans do not look happy. They look hot: the elk all lie beneath a tree, the bison all lie beneath a different tree, the deer all lie beneath another tree. This is not alpine forest; this once-wetland is now a fairly flat, dry pocket of land where ancient volcanic activity provided sediment-rich soil to grow potatoes. Like spuds, these four-legged friends kneel and lie and nuzzle themselves into the cool dirt. But they are not vegetation awaiting harvest, they are animals confined to a pen for another economic purpose: an object for the human gaze, a living, breathing, fur-covered means of entertainment for families on summer holiday. Here, I am complicit, even in my claim of coming for research, for my own writing. Though I am not entertained and did not venture here on our return from Jackson Hole to be titillated at the sight of wildlife, I do perform my own kind of extraction through my experience here, my sadness and rage for their plight, and the way I project this ennui onto these beloved creatures who deserve more than this confinement or an apparition in a piece of writing that longs for Bear World to be no more. As we approach the gate to the bear section of the prison, we pass a lone bighorn sheep standing near the small metal structure, presumably built to provide some shade, and a trough of still water.
Yellowstone Bear World opened in the summer of 1998. At the time, Idaho state law prohibited the commercial importation of black bears; however, a state legislator from Rexburg named Golden Lindford assisted Mike Ferguson in setting up a meeting on June 8, 1998 with several state power brokers, including officials from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, state legislators, a representative of then-U.S. Senator Dirk Kempthorne, and an official from then-governor Phil Batt’s administration. An AP report featured in The Spokesman Review on June 12, 1998, “Bear World gets some bears,” detailed how Bear World was able to “skirt the ban.” At that meeting, an agreement was struck allowing Ferguson to proceed with the park by exploiting “an exemption in state law that allows circuses and wild animal acts to pass through Idaho without a state permit for wildlife facilities.” Two days later the first bears arrived at the facility. One important aspect of the deal required Ferguson not to own any of the bears. Instead, he was allowed to “bring in and display a group of bears owned by a professional trainer who raises the animals for use in movies and commercials.”
Something Timothy Treadwell and I share beyond an affinity for bears is the joy in watching them shimmy up and down a tree trunk. Not a particularly avid or good dancer myself, I often mimic this move in the gay bar. “Let’s do the grizzly shimmy!” I squeal as I shake my shoulders to and fro and bring my hips down and right back up again. Sometimes there is a man standing there as my coniferous post, and sometimes there is no man. Yes, this “dance” straight-up anthropomorphizes the bear, but, in truth, it’s pretty close to one of the many purposes for such tree back-scratching. While bears of all species and sexes do the grizzly shimmy, adult males account for the majority of marked trees during the peak of their mating season. Perhaps the glee in that shimmying black bear’s eye is anticipation, a thought of shared pleasure (and procreation) to come! Biologists also account for other reasons a bear shimmies: removing hair from their pelt, scratching, and, most recently, “slathering on nature-made tick repellent,” according to a 2023 New York Times article by Rebecca Dzmobak titled “Why Do Bears Rub Against Trees? Scientists Offer New Explanations.” Scratching our collective curious itch about bear behavior, Dzombak cited new findings from Polish biologist Agnieszka Sergiel’s Journal of Zoology article, “Anti-parasitic function of tree-rubbing behaviour in brown bears suggests by an in vitro test on a generalist ectoparasite.” The study showed the resins and saps of conifers and tar from beeches serve as plausible repellents of ticks, in particular, but potentially other insects as well. Sergiel cites this as one of many examples of mammals using “self-medication.” We love a healthy bear as much as a thirsty one!
We give the young woman wearing the red collared shirt with the Bear World emblem over the left part of the chest one of our two receipts, and we begin the 3-5 mile per hour crawl through the bear exhibit. I am nervous, fearful even—not merely of the bears, which is an important emotion to feel in close proximity to such beautifully powerful beasts, but also of what I’ll see in this space, what their respective states will be. These nerves are evident in the shaky video footage I return to now and my voice, even more high-pitched and pained than usual. On our left, we first pass a slab of concrete where a few birds peck at what looks to be fish and fruits left, presumably, for the grizzly pacing quickly back and forth farther ahead in another portion of his fenced-in area. A short fence of three thin wires encloses grassy areas on either side of the paved road. They are most certainly electric fences, for there’s no other plausible explanation for the grizzlies to remain behind a fence they might otherwise easily amble over. I see three grizzlies: one on the left pacing, another to our right with his head briefly dipped into a metal bucket filled with water, and a third lying down in the shade of a den-like structure consisting of a metal “roof” leaning against two wood poles, which may or may not be tree trunks. As we continue to move out of the grizzly pens, the hydrated bear begins to pace at a similar stride as his counterpart across the road. They become mirrors of one another, never mirrors of us.
Past the grizzly area, we see countless black bears lying in the shade of sparse trees. Another similarly fenced-in area with the three-wire fence appears to house older black bear cubs or younger adults—one dangles all four paws towards the dirt from his perch straddling a barkless tree trunk uprooted as a kind of playground for the cubs. Another mid-size black bear lies and gently splashes in a long trough of water. In the shade of a few trees, a bear rocks back and forth, back and forth. What I notice here—beyond the sheer number of black bears—is the metal. Every living tree in this area has its trunk completely wrapped in metal sheaths. There is no climbing here, no shimmying with conifers. One enormous black bear sits up against another long trough of water, soaking his hands and dunking his face on occasion. A black bear scratches his side on a low, long metal cylinder halved and dropped on the grass to make another shade area for the residents. I hear myself say “poor thing” as we drive toward the exit, and the video ends.
Recently, Yellowstone Bear World has come under scrutiny from both state and federal agencies. In his March 13, 2023 article for the Post Register, “Idaho passes bill to reduce regulations on Bear World,” Jonathan Hogan recounts a comprehensive history of citations given to the park as well as the ensuing lobbying campaign and legislation which freed Bear World from oversight from certain state agencies. According to Hogan, in 2022, both the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited the wildlife park for multiple violations. OSHA classified their citations as serious: one for putting employees at risk by requiring them to go into a bear enclosure and another for not properly training staff prior to giving them bear spray for such encounters. The initial fine for these violations totaled $8,928, and in a settlement with Bear World in February of 2023 the amount was reduced to $6,250. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s report proved more damning in its scope and threatened a key aspect of Bear World’s business model—bottle-feeding baby cubs. The state agency found several violations, “including failure to provide veterinarian certificates on the health of their animals, failure to obtain permits for animal transfers, and failure to report the deaths of animals.” The report also stated Yellowstone Bear World must discontinue the feeding of wild animals, as public feeding of wild animals is against Idaho law.
Much as in 1998, Bear World decided if they didn’t like the law, they might as well re-write it— literally. In March, the Idaho Senate passed Bill 1084 by a vote of 33-2. The bill removed the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s oversight of facilities with a class C Exhibitor’s License issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. What’s more, Yellowstone Bear World wrote the bill. Senate Bill 1084 has since been passed by the Idaho State Legislature and was signed into law by Governor Brad Little on April 11, 2023.
Black bears generally give birth to their cubs in January. For the next year and a half, they are inseparable. Medieval bestiaries describe a cub born shapeless, taking form when their mother licks them into shape, and so was born the now common phrase. Grizzlies tend to their cubs slightly longer than black bears. Cubs remain with their mothers for two to three years. Mother bears nurse their young in the den, sometimes cradling their cubs in their forelegs and licking their heads as they nurse. As cubs grow, their mother might leave them near trees or a bramble while she goes off to forage and hunt. A single cry from her cubs though, and she’ll be bounding back towards them without pause—always there to protect her offspring, until she isn’t.
For both black and grizzly bears, the families “break up” when mama bear is ready to mate once again. These break-ups can be somewhat hostile, with the mother growling, charging, and chasing her offspring away. However, tenderness remains even after this fracture. The same mother who carried cubs in her mouth or spanked them with her paw towards a tree when danger approached still recognizes her own cubs for years, often allowing female offspring to remain in her territory and removing bears who “trespass” on her territory and might serve as competition for her own offspring. That connection between cub and mother bear is intimate and critical to the former’s development. Even when they separate, something is remembered.
We might call it kinship, or love.
After exiting the bear pen, we veer to the right and park just outside the Three Bears Gift Shop. Just beyond a chain-link fence we see a few amusement rides reminiscent of a traveling carnival. Four large metal bears spin and spin with a parent and/or child in each screaming gleefully on a contraption dubbed Bear Affair. Past that, a log filled to the brim with a family of four clink clink clinks up the tracks before moving down the roller coaster at a moderate speed. The young man who sold us our tickets informed us this is the newest attraction. “It’s fun,” he said. “We call it the Log Roller Coaster.” Groundbreaking. To reach the rides, petting zoo, and cub area, we must enter through the gift shop. A quick trot through a bear-y branded store brimming with all the tourist souvenirs one can imagine and we are amidst countless children and families sharing ice cream cones or tossing popcorn in their mouths—the chewing sometimes offering a brief quiet.
It’s mid-afternoon—the heat of the day—and there isn’t a stitch of shade for visitors, save for a few tables with umbrellas and a small room outside the petting zoo, the walls of which are covered with animal pelts of all kinds, including that of an endangered gray wolf. After seeing all the death on the walls, we take a brief stroll through the petting zoo where a pig and two goats all lie in their respective shady structures looking even more miserable than I feel on the premises as I listen to a gaggle of children scream at and chase ducks and geese into a corner. How re-inventive. Back outside the petting zoo, I see two small bear cubs cuddled together and sleeping in the shade of a rock structure in one of two small pens. A woman in a red Bear World polo stands watch. I ask if the cubs are born here, and she says, “All of our bears are bred and born on site.” No further information is provided, and she did not strike me as someone who was interested in a chat, let alone an interview.
In that moment and now as I extract narrative from this experience, I still wonder to myself, why am I here? Am I complicit in my curiosity, my presence? As Drag Race icon Gia Gunn offers in response to full-blown critique of her look and performance by the judges, “Absolutely!” John Berger also has some thoughts on why we’re here, why we’re looking. He concludes “Why Look at Animals?” with a meditation on the zoo and capitalism. For Berger, the zoo only offers disappointment to humans. In these spaces, the human visitor cannot encounter the gaze of the animal; we experience only a one-way subject-object orientation here. Though that was not always the case in Berger’s conception of the development of human society. The exchange of looks between man and animal played a crucial role in that process: “Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone…The historic loss, to which zoos are a monument, is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism.” And it’s true. The cubs do not look at me. Their keeper doesn’t even seem to want to look at me while I try to speak to her.
Will no living being objectify me here?!
What’s clear is these cubs are kept separate from their mother for the sole purpose of entertainment, and eventually, as an object to allow guests to feed, for a price. There seems to be no bottle-feeding today, and the website suggests that practice begins Memorial Day weekend for a cool $75. This is a very popular event and they can’t guarantee you a spot without a reservation and ticket purchase ahead of time. There’s even a reservation hotline—thank goodness! The separation of a cub from his mother is detrimental to their development and emotional state. According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who had an investigator work undercover at Bear World in 2022, cubs are separated from their mothers by the time they are eight weeks old. They are then kept in the separate pen and handled by as many as 13 guests a day who pay to nurse them in lieu of their own mothers. The investigator witnessed the cubs behaving frantically during these bottle-feeding encounters, trying “to nurse on the chins, necks, fingers, and arms of staff—a displaced suckling behavior often seen in animals who are attempting to soothe themselves after suffering through the trauma of premature separation from their mothers.” This undercover investigation led to the OSHA fines levied against Bear World in early 2023, but these aren’t the only signs of traumatized bears witnessed in the park.
Remember the pacing grizzly and the black bears rocking themselves back and forth, seemingly without end? Researchers describe this behavior as “zoochosis” and claim it indicates an animal is experiencing extreme stress and depression. Zoochosis is often attributed to a lack of both natural stimuli (metal-wrapped trees) and roaming space. Though the park has nearly doubled in size since opening (it’s now over 125-square acres), this size pales in comparison to the average roaming territories for black and brown bears which generally reach into hundreds of square miles.
As I look around at the energized families, their sunburnt cheeks and bellies full of carnival fare, I wonder if I, too, have become inured to suffering. Across the smattering of picnic tables, I watch a father and daughter sitting next to one another strapped to a bench that rises about thirty feet into the air before the ride releases them and they bounce up and down for a minute or so until their turn is over. I turn to my partner and say, “I think it’s time for us to Huckleberry Bounce.”
In what must be karma, irony, or simply the lumbering of life’s dark humors, our air conditioner goes out for the three-and-a-half-hour drive back to Salt Lake City. I feel the sweat bead on my forehead before we stop at Idaho Falls. We sit on a rock under a bridge and let the mist of the Snake River crashing onto itself cool us off for a bit. Above us in the greenbelt park, a young woman takes graduation photos. Another adolescent, Bible in tow, appears to be there for a confirmation photo shoot. We continue on, but as the heat in our struggling Subaru escalates, we pull off the interstate for a milkshake at a Dairy Queen somewhere south of Idaho Falls, a cool chocolate treat I can’t finish before passing out with the windows cracked—air flowing into the car, cooling not a soul.
When we finally make it back to our apartment, I scroll through my videos and find a short clip from the black bear exhibit. At one point, a larger bear meanders down the middle of the road, and we slow to a stop (against the rules!) as he crosses in front of the car. “He’s really close,” I whine, afraid. He approaches the passenger side door and looks up at me—into my eyes, not the iPhone I hold recording it all, the frame trembling. I pause the video: his amber eye glistens in the sun just above the window frame, a burr stuck to the top of his head. I look at him, wandering what, if anything, we saw in one another in that fleeting encounter. I think of Berger, how a man can be right and wrong, sometimes in the same moment. I did not feel alone in the car, perhaps because I wasn’t. I press play. My voice rises, “Irán!” He drives us forward in silence until the parched grass and shade and bears all go black, together. As I set my phone down, the air conditioner whirs in our small, one-bedroom; dusk pierces the slatted vinyl blinds. All I feel is loneliness.
Matty Layne Glasgow is the author of deciduous qween (Red Hen Press, 2019), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. His poems and essays recently appear in or are forthcoming from AGNI, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Queer Nature, Southeast Review, Strange Hymnal, and elsewhere. Matty is a Black Earth Institute Fellow for which he co-edited the “Strange Wests” issue of About Place Journal with Jasmine Elizabeth Smith. He holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Utah and is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Charleston where he currently serves as the CNF Editor for swamp pink.
References
“Bear World gets some bears.” The Spokesman Review, 12 Jun 1998.
Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking, Pantheon Books, 1980.
“Black Bear or Grizzly Bear?” BearWise (website).
Dzombak, Rebecca. “Why Do Bears Rub Against Trees? Scientists Offer New Explanation.” The New York Times, 1 Feb 2023.
“Excavation of protected wetlands stopped at proposed Yellowstone Bear World park.” Moscow-Pullman Daily News, 5 May 1998.
Hogan, Jonathan. “Idaho Senate passes bill to reduce regulations on Bear World.” Post Register, 13 Mar 2023.
Hogan, Jonathan. “OSHA opens inquiry into Bear World after undercover investigation by PETA.” Post Register, 21 Jul 2022.
“PETA Complaint Prompts OSHA Penalty Against Yellowstone Bear World.” PETA Investigates.
Rothbard, Murray. America’s Great Depression. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000.
“Snake River.” American Rivers (website).
Yasmeen, Roheela et al. “Zoochosis: A short review on stereotypical behavior of captive animals.” Journal of Wildlife and Biodiversity, Vol 7 Issue 2, 2023.
Yellowstone Bear World (website).
Hogan, Jonathan. “Idaho Senate passes bill to reduce regulations on Bear World.” Post Register, 13 Mar 2023.
