Charlie Russell spent 48 years working with bears, but that wasn’t the toughest part of his job.
He said teaching people to understand bear behaviour has proven much more difficult.
Russell has lived and worked around bears for most of his life. He grew up in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, and later ranched for 18 years in the middle of bear country.
He said he has never lost an animal to a bear.
Russell recommends that farmers and ranchers store grain and feed in solid containers if they want to keep problem bears away from their yards. As well, people should learn to relax.
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“Don’t freak out because they come onto your land,” he said.
Russell grew up hearing the same stories about bears that are still common today: that they’re dangerous and will attack without hesitation.
But while working on a film about grizzlies with his father and brother, Russell discovered bears were nothing like what he expected.
“I saw an animal that was so different from the stories I’d heard.”
A desire to change the perceptions about the animals sparked Russell to set out on a lifetime of research.
“I wanted to explore two questions. Are they unpredictable and are they dangerous if they lose their fear of us?”
Russell spent 10 years living with brown bears in Kamchatka, Russia.
In the summer of 2005, he taught a pair of orphaned cubs, Andy and Malish, to fend for themselves.
He used a fence to keep wild bears away from a small area around his house and carried pepper spray when he took the cubs into the wilderness. He did not carry a gun and saw weapons as part of the problem.
“Guns gave us the power not to get along with them.”
Russell said he found the wild bears to be a larger threat to his cubs than to himself because some wild males will kill cubs for food. Russell would act as protector to the cubs, scaring off larger males to ensure their safety.
But if the cubs were left on their own, they could find themselves in a dangerous situation.
During his last summer in Kamchatka, Malish was killed by an adult male in the area.
Since 2005, Russell has travelled around the world to teach people what he has learned.
He has spoken in Slovakia, Italy, Slovenia, Russia, the United States and Canada, including a recent visit to the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
But he said he feels he has had little effect.
“The same wrong things keep being said yet today and I don’t seem to be much influence.”
He said people must work to change the negative view of bears not just for the animals’ sake, but for their own sake as well.
“It’s about us, too. It’s about our relationship with everything, with nature,” he said.
“We tend to think of ourselves as not a part of nature. And they’ve shown me how to think that we are. What else could we be?”
