Get Bear Smart Society - Bear Behaviour

Bears treat people in much the same way as they treat other bears. Unlike our pets, who are generally eager to please their master, bears are headstrong individuals with whom constant relationship negotiation is required. A bear will treat other animals, including people, as individuals.

Bears are animals who have a highly evolved social structure. Various individuals might share resources and security, form hierarchies and have structured kinship relationships.

As cubs develop through social play, they have ritualized mechanisms to meet strangers and decide if they're to be friends or not. Bears share social communication of food sources, social learning mechanisms and even social security.

Bears are individuals that can be remorseful, empathetic, fearful, selfish, altruistic, joyful and deceitful. They have mechanisms for solving disputes and demonstrating need.

Communication between bears is sometimes physical - their intentional use of bites, paws or body to illustrate or emphasize a point is sometimes painfully, but most of the time cautiously restrained. A bear's bite, unlike a dog's, is always carefully measured, and even when it hurts, it doesn't usually break the skin. Bites are often used to convey messages; for instance, they may be used to communicate a desire for the other animal to back away or to stop a certain behaviour. A mother may use a message bite to convey her discontent with a cub's behaviour. Likewise, two siblings might use message bites or swats to settle a dispute over food.

The need for two individual bears, unknown to each other and meeting in the woods, to communicate basic intentions and moods to one another is critical. All the primary vocalizations - and they are many and varied - appear to be instinctive rather than learned. Although generally recognised vocalizations among bears are important, they still use innate body language and verbal intensities to communicate emotion and mood. There are a number of basic forms of vocalisations, each of which can carry a level of intensity and commitment. There are sounds of contentment, roars, moans, gulps, grunts and guttural sounds which are used to convey happiness, recognition, nervousness, distress, fear or pain. Other sounds are used to communicate a bear's desire, like a gulp-grunt used by mothers to call cubs or by males to solicit females during courtship. The soft appeasement moan is made in the company of another adult bear indicating recognition, acceptance and bonding. An irritated moan is made by an unhappy cub, while a soft, rhythmic, droning chuckle can be heard when the cub is happy. When cubs play with each other, they use an "eh-eh" vocalization to limit bite pressures from their opponent as they wrestle. The list goes on.

Mechanically produced sounds, such as teeth-clacking, huffing and swatting are used as defensive or motivational displays. Just like humans, bears will use vocal intonations to emphasize urgency. A message can also be emphasized using scent, like marks on bear trees, urine marks, scat marks, walking over saplings, arching the back to mark overhanging branches, stiff-legged walk (creating obviously sunken footprints), bite marks and genital drag marks. These marks are left as olfactory and visual cues for other bears.

Bears are a fully developed social species occupying the same time and place as humans, evolving not behind us, but beside us. They are, in fact, altruistic. Because bears each require so much territory, they direct this reciprocal altruism toward unrelated fellow bears that they may never even meet - an admirable quality in humans. Other highly evolved animals, like the great apes, only cooperate within troops of recognisable members.

Social Play

Play is one of the most important elements in the bonding process. Bears' social play is wrestling, which includes biting, tackling and chasing. It begins when cubs are about eight weeks old and continues into adulthood.

But just entering into play is high risk among animals fully equipped with the means to kill. Like a dog's "play-bow", bears will use a "head-wag" to signal that the intent of the upcoming action is play, not the aggression it would be without the signal. The head is held low and swung back and forth fairly quickly as they start to charge, then launch themselves at their sibling or mate. Another signal often used is the double-take with the eyes. Many of the signals have different meanings depending on what they are doing at the time. This is the hardest part for people to understand, the idioms.

Often a young cub will practise the sumo-wrestler dance, first facing off and mouth-wrestling, then quickly going up unto their hind legs until one ultimately pushes the other over. This instinctive, stereotyped and ritualistic form of play is often used later in the cub's adult life, allowing two unknown bears to assess each other on initial contact, judging their ability to become friends or not.

Learning and Teaching

Cubs can learn from each other or from observing their mothers. For example, cubs observe each other while foraging; when one cub makes a discovery, another will come over and solicit its breath, then search for the same food. This method of learning goes one step further, for not only do the cubs learn what to eat, they also get assurance that it isn't poisonous.

The next step up the developmental ladder from learning is teaching, an act directed at another individual. There are several types of teaching: "Opportunity" teaching, which provides opportunities to learn and is considered the simplest form. "Coaching" - shaping behaviour through reinforcement - is somewhere in the middle. Finally "demonstration" teaching, or showing how something is done, is considered the most complex form - bears use demonstrations all the time. A mother bear often demonstrates foraging methods or hunting techniques to her cubs.

Deception

If an animal is smart enough to learn and to teach, the next question as we work our way up the hierarchy of intelligence is; can it use deception? Not to be confused with natural camouflage or instinctive blending into the surrounding terrain, what behaviourists are looking for here is planned deception applied in a specific situation.

According to Marc Hauser, author of Machiavellian Intelligence II, "in order for an individual to intentionally deceive another, it must have the capacity to represent its own beliefs, to understand that by engaging in some action, it can alter someone else's beliefs and, as a result of such actions, that individual will be misled into believing something that is not true."

Ben Kilham's book cites an incident that involves marking trees. When a bear does a full back-rub on a tree, its last act in this stereotyped display is to rotate its head and bite the tree; the height of the bite therefore indicates the height of the individual leaving the mark. Ben Kilham recalls one of his orphans coming across a food-marking bite tree. Since the cub was only seven months old at the time, it was obvious it wasn't going to leave much of a statement as to its stature. The cub took the initiative to climb the tree and, at a height of about five and a half feet, left a more respectable mark. The cub's mark on the tree and the scent of all three cubs would leave a deceptive message that perhaps an adult sow accompanied the cubs and they were all using the food patch.

On another occasion, Ben recalls an incident where a mother deliberately deceived him as to the whereabouts of her cubs by continuously looking up at a tree for cubs that weren't there. They were safely hidden in another tree.

Self-awareness and Theory of Mind

The definition of "theory of mind" is the ability to read the desires, beliefs and intentions of others, i.e. recognizing that an animal other than oneself has a mind. It means performing actions based on an assessment of how another mind is reacting to them. During an encounter with a large male bear, one of Ben's orphans, now a fully-grown female ready to mate, backed down the male advancing toward Ben with a very aggressive lunge and a strong guttural grunt. If it were not for this remarkably altruistic act, Ben may not be with us today.

Cooperation

There is significant evidence of cooperative feeding among bears. It has been well documented that areas of food abundance (e.g. salmon streams, garbage dumps or corn fields) are often shared by many bears. In fact, bears leave messages along the network of trails leading to these sites; scats deposited along the way leave messages of what food is available as well as its location. These marked trails and actual congregations suggest that bears not only advertise the location of these food sources, but are somehow benefiting by sharing them, even to the extent where fourteen polar bears have been observed feeding on the same walrus carcass. Whether these incidents can be proven to represent cooperation is debatable; nonetheless, it certainly demonstrates that the required mechanisms to develop intentional recruitment toward excess food are present.

Altruism

Similar to the concept of cooperation between animals is "reciprocal altruism". The difference is the time-lag, so that instead of gaining an immediate benefit, one individual benefits on one occasion, and the other will do so some other time. There is much debate whether altruistic relationships can arise between unrelated animals. During Ben's many years of observing his orphans growing and having families of their own, he also cites wonderful examples of friendship and favours granted outside the family unit. He recalls a well-documented historical account from Warren, New Hampshire: In June of 1873, a small girl, age three, wandered off into the woods. Neighbours searched for her for four days before beginning to lose hope. When they finally found her, she was unharmed but hungry, sleeping under a large pine tree, with bear tracks all around her. She said that a big black dog had found her and slept with her every night to keep her warm."

Watch Kilham on YouTube.