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Previous week I’ve wondered in California, Bay Area to be more precise. As so many times before, Pacific Coast was my favorite but this time I was also trapped by the old books of the host’s house library. Several of them from the beginning of the twentieth century, among them The Adventures of James Capen Adams by Theodore H. Hittell (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1911). As Adams biographer, Hittell did a good job of narrating the tales of Adams the hunter and Adams the animal trainer, too good I should say, because at first I was stun by the ’coolness’ with which Adams describes his animal killings. Proud killer, that type of passion. Eventually, however, my awareness of how high understanding of animals, if not love for them, is necessary for an successful animal trainer let me be in peace with Grizzly Adams.

Grizzly Adams

James Capen Adams, well known as Grizzly Adams, was a successful hunter, very successful, and an animal trainer, very successful. In the fall of 1852 he took up a residence in a remote valley on a branch of the Mercedes river. Within four years he was renowned proprietor of Mountaineer Museum in San Francisco, which featured "the largest collection of wild animals ever exhibited on the Pacific coast", and four years latter a partner in a hugely successful wild animal show on Broadway in New York City. His trained grizzly bear Lady Washington toted up to 200-pound loads for Adams on hunting expeditions.

Adams killed many animals for personal gain and captured wild animals to supply menageries. So, he was not a naturalist and animals lover in the modern sense of the word. Nevertheless, even by today standards, he was a keen and interested observer of wildlife and he enjoyed a fond and respectful relationship with many of his animals. In the spring of 1854 Adams captured two grizzly cubs near Little Yosemite Valey; one of the cubs became Adams’s most famous trained bear, Ben Franklin.

"My next adventure, and the most fortunate of all my career, was the capture of Ben Franklin, the flower of his race, my firmest friend, the boon companion of my after-year" - says Adams to his biographer. But before that, in several lengthy paragraphs, he proudly describes how he hunted and killed the mother-bear just to get her two cubs. Should I be annoyed by this? The emotion of chasing down prey and the behavior of killing the prey are controlled by different circuits in the brain [The biology of violence by Debra Niehoff, 2002]. We are emotionally wired to learn prey and not prey but the decision that bears are for killing reflects the current culture. I’m sure Adams would use a tranquilizer nowadays to still the cubs.

Grizzly Adams and Ben Franklin 

 2012-02-19 

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