Thoughts on Nell and Cinnamon from the Ursa Society

I’ve been thinking about what happened to the Grizzly family…
and there is something deeper that I think we need to understand.

The Conservation Officer Service says this mother had become ‘food-conditioned’ and had experienced a ‘significant loss of fear of people.’

But stop for a moment and think about what "loss of fear of people" actually means from the bear's perspective.

It means she had learned to trust us.

Not intellectually, and certainly not through some formal ‘agreement.’ 
But through experience.

For years, this mother lived around the edges of the community of Nelson. She encountered human beings again and again. She brought her cubs into this shared landscape. And hundreds or perhaps thousands of times, nothing terrible happened.

People saw her.
She saw people.

People watched her cubs grow and play.
She learned that people could be nearby without hurting her.

And gradually, naturally, fear was replaced by trust.

Her cubs learned from that relationship too.

When authorities describe this clinically as "habituation" or a "loss of fear," we should understand what those sterile words actually describe: a wild animal changed her behaviour because her lived experience taught her that we were safe.

And then, suddenly, we weren't.

Imagine the tragedy of that from the animal's side of this relationship.

“Wait! I thought you weren't going to hurt us! I’ve lived beside you for years! I've raised my babies here! I’ve walked past your homes! You’ve watched us! We’ve watched you! I learned not to fear you!

And now you kill my cub…?

And then you kill me…?

What happened to the relationship I thought we had…?”

Obviously, a grizzly doesn't formulate those sentences in human language.

But animals absolutely learn from repeated experience. 
They learn what is safe. They learn what is dangerous. 

And that is what makes this so heartbreaking.

The trust wasn't imaginary.
In fact, the government's own description of this bear as having a "significant loss of fear of people" is evidence that it existed.

And then we broke it in the most absolute way possible.

We killed one of her cubs.
Then we killed her.

And we separated the two surviving cubs from the family they had known their entire lives and released them somewhere else.

I’m sure they are lost now… not knowing what has happened. Probably searching for their family. But it’s destroyed.

Something is profoundly wrong with the murder of these animals.

Because if a wild animal's growing trust of human beings eventually becomes the justification for killing her, then we have an enormous responsibility to either prevent that relationship from reaching that point, or find humane ways to manage the coexistence we allowed to develop.

We cannot spend years allowing an animal to learn:

‘You are safe here. These humans won't hurt you.’

And then one day answer:

‘You trusted us too much. Now you have to die.’

That is the contradiction I cannot get past.

And it is why I believe what happened here wasn't simply the killing of two bears.

It was a profound breaking of trust.

The mother bear's trust.
Her cubs' trust.
And the trust of many human beings in Nelson who had come to experience that coexistence with these magnificent animals was actually possible.

And there is another loss here that is almost impossible for me to put into words.

I was fortunate enough to have an experience with this mother and her cubs that I will never forget.

I watched them together in a lush green pasture on a beautiful sunny day (see my videos)

The cubs were playing.
Their mother was there with them.

As I stood quietly watching, BC hummingbirds appeared around me. Butterflies moved through the pasture. The sun was shining. Everything felt extraordinarily alive. 

And there, in the middle of it all, was this family of grizzlies simply living their lives.

I had a friend visiting me at the time who had never been to British Columbia before. She had never seen bears in the wild.

She stood there and watched this scene unfold too.

It brought tears to her eyes.

The mountains, the rivers, the Bald Eagles, and now this… She told me that British Columbia was the most beautiful place she had ever seen in her life.

Think about what an extraordinary thing that is.

One of her first experiences of this place was standing in a sunlit green pasture, surrounded by hummingbirds and butterflies, watching a mother grizzly and her cubs playing together in the distance.

Wildness. Beauty. Life. And the extraordinary privilege of living somewhere where human beings can still share a landscape with animals as magnificent as these.

I can't adequately explain what that experience did to us.
I honestly felt blessed by these bears.
It nourished my soul.
It was one of those rare moments when the separation we normally feel between ourselves and the natural world seems to disappear. I wasn't watching nature on television or travelling somewhere far away to experience wildlife.

I was standing near my favourite community, witnessing something ancient, beautiful and completely real.

A mother playing and living with her children.

And I realized something as I thought about her death:

That is part of what was killed too.

We didn't only lose a bear.

We lost all of the moments that would have come after her.

The person who would have stopped at the edge of that pasture next summer and watched her.

The child who might have seen a grizzly mother with her cubs for the first time.

The visitor to British Columbia who might have been moved to tears, just as my friend was.

The neighbour who would have looked out across the landscape one morning and felt their heart stop for a moment at the sheer beauty of seeing her there.

The photographs that will never be taken.

The cubs she will never raise.

But even that doesn't capture the full extent of what was lost.

Because it isn't only our future experiences with her that have been taken from us.

Something has happened to our memories too.

That beautiful afternoon in the pasture still belongs to me - nothing can erase it.

But I can't remember it now without also remembering that she was murdered.

The image of those cubs playing in the sunshine now exists alongside the knowledge that one of them was later killed, and that their mother was too.

Something that once existed in my memory as pure beauty now carries pain with it.

And I know I'm not alone.

For the many people in this community who watched this mother. 
Photographed her. 
Followed her life and watched her raise her cubs and came to care deeply about this family; 
those memories have not disappeared…

But they have been wounded.

And for some people, a profound sense of betrayal has been attached to them.

Because something beautiful existed here.

Something rare.

Something that had been growing between these bears, this land, and this community for years.

The pasture is still there.

The butterflies will come.

The hummingbirds will still fly through it.

The sun will still shine.

But she won't be there.

And that is a loss far greater than the words ‘bear dispatched’ could ever begin to convey.