Grizzly Man
By So let’s go ahead and drop this into the “Colbert is Making Sense” file:
Friends and colleagues of an animal trainer killed by a performing bear called it a “freak accident” Wednesday and said the 700-pound grizzly should not be put to death. The animal, they said, did not intend to kill the bear expert.
“The same thing he was doing I have done a hundred times. We wrestle the bears in a loving way,” said Joel Almquist, an animal trainer who has worked extensively with Rocky, the 5-year-old grizzly who killed 39-year-old Stephan Miller on Tuesday with a single bite to the neck.
“This bear has never shown aggression,” Almquist said. “It was a flash bite, a real quick . . . bam. Unfortunately, we are built like tissue paper compared to them.”
Not to be unkind to the recently departed, but I’d have to assume that a genuine “bear expert” would probably not be — you know — wrestling a grizzly bear “in a loving way” (to say nothing of the other possible motives). But since the entire project of western civilization depends to some degree on mastering the beasts and recruiting them to do stupid shit for our amusement, the sacrifice of Stephan Miller will not go unacknowledged. Without the totally persuasive performance of Bart the Bear, for example, The Edge would not have been anywhere near worth the dollar I paid to see it.