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Perhaps you saw that headline circulating last week about a through a deserted Montana campground. If you did, you almost certainly wanted to know more. Whether it’s a wildlife on wildlife story like that one or a man surviving a mauling by a grizzly bear when it , there’s no doubt about it – we can’t get enough of grizzly bears.

Or black bears for that matter. And bear biologist Wes Larson has a theory as to why. “It taps into something that is deep within all of us,” muses Larson.



“For a long time in human evolution, this was our main threat. We were prey for a lot of different things for tens of thousands of years. So it's this primal fear that almost everyone has.

Maybe you don't even realize that you have it. But it's down within our psyche.” My own interest in that video clip took me down a rabbit hole to Larson’s Instagram page, where I was faced with a photo of the biologist coming face-to-face with a black bear after crawling 80 feet down a den to conduct field observations – by no means his only closeup with a bear, but certainly his most memorable.

“That was a really a really scary night,” he recalls. “It was a night that I really had to suppress a lot of innate fears and things telling me this is not something you should be doing.” Despite those innate fears, Larson has spent the best part of 20 years studying bears – grizzly, black, polar and sloth – and launched his own wildlife podcast Tooth and Claw to dive deeper into animal be.

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