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The Intelligence of Bears

© Gerald Eugene Smith

Bears have a stereotyped image as big, clumsy and slow-moving. They aren't thought of as intelligent even though they can be readily trained to remarkable performances in the circus. Circus bears juggle, ride vehicles or roller skates, play sports (hockey and basketball), play musical instruments and in general perform routines of remarkable complexity. The only other land animals of comparable trainability are primates. In fact, bears are comparable in intelligence to the higher primates short of the great apes. In North America, bears have the largest and most convoluted brains relative to their size of any land mammal. They are considered by many wildlife biologists to be the most intelligent land animals of our continent.

Their intelligence reflects the fact that they are omnivores. Omnivores are often substantially smarter than their more specialised brethren. Consider, for example, raccoons and pigs. Omnivores have to remember much information about their varied food sources, and must be adaptable and flexible with their strategies for obtaining them. Bears are the greatest omnivores of all next to humans. Bears keep in their capacious memories a complete map of the vast territories they live in, comprehensive both as to place (the many places where various sorts of food can be obtained) and time (knowing in what seasons to obtain them). They pick up this knowledge in the extensive education they receive from their mothers (she'll give them a light, open-pawed smack on the side of the head to remind them to pay attention). Bears also constantly check out every little thing in their territories and take note of even the smallest details. They also have a keen sense of curiousity and are quite willing to explore new situations to see if they lead to new food oportunities.

Although wildlife biologists still haunted by the ghost of Skinnerian Behaviorism automatically deny bears any ability for abstract reasoning, it is obvious to those who have observed them that they can reason situations out and draw inferences from evidence, often in an eerily human-like fashion. Anyway who has looked into the eyes of bears in photographs (or real life) cannot help but notice the impression of shrewd intelligence and careful appraisal going on in the mind of the animal; the only other animals whose eyes create that same kind of impression are primates.

There are numerous anecdotes illustrating the deductive capability of bears. One of my favorites concerns a female grizzly who was part of a study. Two years previous to the incident, she had been captured with a cable snare around the foot and shot in the rump with a tranquilizer dart. When she was captured again after 2 years, she dug a hole just big enough to hold her big hairy behind and sat in it, waiting for the biologists. She obviously remembered what had happened the previous occasion. When she was shot in the neck instead, she gave the biologists a look of outrage before passing out. Other bears, especially grizzlies, have become rogues, killing vast numbers of livestock with impunity for years, defying the cleverest hunters and trappers to catch them. The cunning and shrewdness of such bears became legendery.

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