‘Nature’ program focuses on grizzly
Stop a minute, close your eyes and try to imagine your head inside a female grizzly bear’s mouth. Try to imagine that one of her canines has pierced your skull and the other has ripped part of the skin from your face.
You would be as certain as Mark Matheny was that you were going to die.
“I remember thinking, ‘My time on earth is done. I’m going to miss my wife and kids. Now I’m going to meet my creator,’ ” Matheny said by phone recently as he tore along a highway through “the great state of Montana.”
Matheny, president of Bozeman’s UDAP Industries Inc., is one of the people who populate “The Good, the Bad and the Grizzly,” an episode of the “Nature” series on PBS.
Oscar winner Chris Cooper narrates this hour, the focus of which is the icon of Yellowstone National Park – the grizzly bear.
The burning question: Should it be removed from the Endangered Species list?
Despite his harrowing experience, Matheny doesn’t blame the bears and admits humans have moved into grizzly territory, not the other way around.
“The whole reason for even putting grizzlies on the list,” he says, “is that there were only a very few of them left. The idea was to bring them to a healthy population of bears, (but) today there is a healthy population.”
It wasn’t always so. In the middle of the last century, grizzlies were reduced to eating garbage which park rangers left deliberately at designated dump sites. The bears fed where tourists could watch and photograph. Images of this circus are part of the documentary narrative.
In 1972, bears emerged from hibernation to find that the garbage dumps had been closed. The reversal of policy was a gamble that proved grizzlies are more enterprising than anyone imagined.
Ranchers and other full-time residents of grizzly country argue that the bears have recovered sufficiently to be de-listed. Environmentalists argue the bears’ natural food sources – animal, plant and insect – remain in delicate balance and could go either way over the next several years. Without these natural sources, bears would be driven to venture even farther into human habitat.
As one rancher says, “It’s real easy to want to protect the grizzly when you’re sittin’ in your livin’ room in Florida.”
Most persuasive among the program’s many voices are those of Wyoming Game and Fish Department bear management specialist Mark Bruscino, who works overtime to keep bears and people safe.
The other is Matheny, an attack victim who doesn’t want to obliterate grizzly bears.
“Knowing what I know, I’m for de-listing,” he says, “and as a hunter and a conservationist, I know the feds can’t take care of this forever.”
His experience – particularly the part during which he believed he surely would die – was a kind of epiphany. (The story of his attack, bloody photos and all, can be found at www.udap.com/markfullstory.htm.)
“From this point of view, I think the attack was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “My life since then has been to try to keep someone else from being attacked.”