7. Teddy Bears Picnic
One of the songs I heard growing up was the old song given by the chapter title. It was written by John Walter Bratton in 1907. It was only in 1932 that a vocal version of the song appeared. Performed by a few artists including Bing Crosby and Jerry Garcia, I have a rousing version done by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on cassette. As you might guess, this chapter deals primarily with bears.
By now it should be obvious that four-legged animals – for the most part – get along quite well with two-legged ones. This may not be exactly true during hunting season, but even then, those carrying rifles admire wild turkeys and deer, and many enjoy just being out in the woods away from civilization. Those men and women probably find being up in a tree stand to be exhilarating. A family’s relationship with Fang or Garfield is a loving one – extending both ways. Each member of the venture obtains something from it. As we have seen, a child offers the family beagle love as well as water and food. In turn, this creature brings calmness and has a soothing effect on the owner and his or her family.
An outstanding Canadian movie about working together – people with other people and humans with the animal kingdom – is the 2005 movie, Spirit Bear: The Simon Jackson Story. Karmode bears, known as spirit bears, are cream-colored and not albino bears nor of the family of polar bears. They are related to the North American black bear of British Columbia. At times a black mother can produce a white cub because of recessive genes.
Based on real-life events, this inspirational motion picture is the story of a fifteen-year old boy, who when being preyed upon in the wilds of British Columbia, is saved by a Kermode bear. Soon Simon realizes that this rare white bear is endangered by the lumbering industry, with only 400 of these magnificent animals left in the region. The corporation is out to destroy the very place that Spirit Bear calls home.
It makes a convincing argument that one person can affect change. This young political activist is deeply inspired not only by the white bear, but by others around him. They in turn may have lost hope but instead are motivated by Simon, who stood up to the forest industry. These companies have so many places to harvest wood, and could do so without so much devastation to resources and wildlife if only they acted in an environmentally sound way, instead of clear cutting.
Simon’s task is formidable, as he is up against not only the powerful forest industry but also the provincial government. The Backstreet Boys and Prince William joined the movement and the result is 2500 square miles being saved on Princess Royal Island. Not many large land protection battles won have been more significant. For his leadership, Simon was recognized by Time Magazine as a Hero for the Planet.
Spirit Bear illustrates the connection between man and animal. It also gives us hope and should convince each of us that we can make a difference. Obviously if a group joins in to help, matters will be that much easier to accomplish any goal. People and animals feed on each other – I don’t mean it that way. In any event, it won’t be easy, but great things can be accomplished. They probably wouldn’t have been involved without that first initiation by a single individual.
Ruth Elizabeth McCombs was born in September 1900 in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Despite living in the place where the first oil well was drilled, her family wasn’t poor but not rich, either. William Harvest Harkness, Jr. hailed from a wealthy New York family, but not connected to the Standard Oil clan. The family did have an estate in Connecticut, though. The two met in Manhattan while in their early twenties and noticed each other instantly. They were bohemians and weren’t bothered by Prohibition, as they quickly discovered the speakeasies. Both were seekers of adventure with Ruth having two things she hated: going to bed at night and waking in the morning.
Ruth managed one semester at the University of Colorado and then taught English in Cuba before landing in New York. Bill graduated from Harvard in 1924 and embarked on journeys to different corners of the globe. In the spring of 1934, the Harvard graduate and his associates brought back a few Komodo dragons from Indonesia. Though just as close as married, Ruth and Bill didn’t wed until September 9, 1934, in a small civil ceremony. Soon Bill headed off on a three-year hunting excursion. Naturally, Ruth wanted to be there with him. At the time, there were trips by different people to capture animals for zoos and also for stuffing. Frank Buck supposedly delivered 10,000 mammals and 100,000 birds from the wilds. Many of those numbers died on the way to the United States.
On February 19, 1936, outside Shanghai, Bill Harkness was in a hospital, dying of cancer. He and his associate Floyd Tangier Smith were stuck there. Because of his heavy drinking and smoking, Bill died, leaving Ruth a grieving widow. At first she couldn’t believe that he had died, but when it was confirmed, it affected her deeply. Eventually she felt that she had to finish what her husband had been doing in his search for the panda. Less than two months after Bill’s death, she was headed east to London and Paris on board the liner American Trader. She departed Paris with Gerry Russell who went with her to China on board the Tancred. It was fortunate that Russell came along insofar as Ruth had no experience of being in these far off places. Her friends thought she was crazy since she never walked in New York if a taxi was on the scene. Floyd Smith, an associate of her husband was in China and could have been of assistance to her.
Arriving in the Far East, despite the decadence, noise, smell and absence of morals, Shanghai impressed her with its huge skyscrapers. This was a place where Communism met capitalism. After spending some time with Smith, she felt he was as useful as the comatose 113th U. S. Congress. Floyd seemed to be along for the ride and for Bill’s money when he was working with him. In her eyes, Russell wasn’t much better. She let them both go when she met a few others. Jack Young and Dan Reib really knew what they were doing, but the former had another commitment. His brother Quentin was younger but had a great deal of promise, so he and Dan were on board with her. Quentin was engaged to Diana Chen but that didn’t keep the sparks from flying between him and Ruth.
They would begin hunting in a region southwest of Chengdu. At the time, China was overcome with political struggles, with the communists fighting the Kuomintang. It was a difficult time for foreigners as well as locals. The panda pursuit was fraught with concerns since these 400-pound animals survived almost exclusively on bamboo. These bears had survived for millions of years. The expedition of Ruth and her crew began in late September 1936 when they boarded the steamer Whangpu, heading up the Long River. They then boarded the Mei Ling, which would bring them to Chungking. Once they departed the Yangtze, they had to be concerned about bandits, wild animals, the heat and the environment, where they had to climb up steep slopes and go through dense bamboo filled brush. The excursion was planned to cover over two-dozen miles per day.
She may have been on the adventure of her life, but Ruth wanted no part of killing any panda, since she loved all animals. For a short stretch, the party had some protection and she even had some practice shooting, although she and guns never got along. She was asked to carry a gun but usually refused to do so. From what she had managed in target practice, she was led to believe That she should not be trusted with a weapon of any kind.
Besides Young and Reib, the group had sixteen coolies and a cook, Wang Whai Hsin. There’d be a few more who joined the venture, even if only for part of the journey. She may not have had the outdoor experience, but she had people who could help her achieve her goal. Though she paid for Russell’s return home, he was actually on the trail ahead of her in the pursuit of the panda, reporting to his partner in Shanghai, the hospitalized Smith.
Because of her determination and the resourcefulness of the crew, they brought a baby giant panda into the camp, judged to be about a week old. At birth, a panda only weighs a few ounces. Called Baby at first, this find was later renamed Su-Lin after Jack’s wife. Now they had to feed him and bring him to Shanghai – no easy task. Ruth and Quentin gave him nourishment and nurtured him and they arrived in the city in November of the same year they began the excursion. The one bad thing was that Su-Lin was taken away from his mother.
Pandas are also known as giant pandas or panda bears and not related to the red panda, which lives in the Communist part of China. That figures. Pandas have been known to live as long forty years or longer if well cared for, although their average life is twenty-five years in captivity. In the wild, scientists haven’t determined their lifespan. The weight of a male can be as much as 350 pounds, but averaging about 230 pounds. The female registers from 170 to 270 pounds.
As Su-Lin grew, the next challenge Ruth and Quentin was to transport the baby panda to a zoo in the United States. Because Ruth had used the idea that it’s better to do something and then apologize later rather than seek permission, she was delayed boarding the ship home. She was all set when politics left her behind. Finally she was on her way with the giant panda. Her plan was to give Baby to a zoo that would finance her next journey in the Far East. She had no takers until Su-Lin joined the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. After a while it was discovered that Su-Lin was a male.
Harkness returned to China the next year for another panda, but it wasn’t the same with Quentin’s absence and China being attacked by the Japanese. Nevertheless, in December she had another baby panda, Mei-Mei, who was three times the size of Su-Lin when he was found. In the years that followed she saw the suffering of the pandas as they were being captured as well as those who had perished along the way. Then she realized she was almost doing the same thing in her pursuits. Her leaving China with Mei-Mei was easier than her previous departure with Baby and soon the two pandas were together at the Brookfield Zoo. On Friday April 1, 1938, Su-Lin died of pneumonia.
Ruth eventually returned to Manhattan and did some writing for magazines, even giving up drinking, which she had done too often. Then she went back into partying and her health suffered for it. Around the end of July 1947, she was found dead in her bathtub in her hotel, reportedly of acute alcoholic gastro-enteritis. Haskness had written, The Lady And The Panda: An Adventure, The Baby Giant Panda and Pangoan Diary. Many other books have been written about Ruth and the pandas, including one I thoroughly recommend, The Lady And The Panda: The True Adventures Of The First American Explorer To Bring Back China’s Most Exotic Animal by Vicky Croke. The author researched letters written by Harkness and ones from her close friend Hazel Perkins. Relatives of Perkins, Reib and the Youngs provided great insight into the incredible lady explorer.
You may have heard of another bear explorer, Dr. Ian Stirling, who earned biology degrees from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver as well as a Ph.D. from New Zealand’s Canterbury University. His research on the polar bear in the Arctic encompassed about 40 years as he explained their evolution and behavior. Stirling has written three books on the animal including, Polar Bears: A Natural History Of A Threatened Species.
When children see a koala bear, they want to have one as a pet, replacing their stuffed teddy bear, whose ear was chewed off. They’re young so they don’t realize that there aren’t any eucalyptus trees in the back yard, which is what these bears need as nourishment. Found in Australia, they sleep as many as twenty hours a day but are antisocial, becoming dependent on the mother and siblings.
No matter what the type of bear is, polar, spirit, black, brown, panda or koala – but not teddy – many people can’t get close enough to the creature. In Yellowstone Park, a father may want a family member to get up-close so he can take a photo for Facebook. It’s not that great an idea, rather a terrible one. All bears are wild animals, possessing sharp claws and they can hurt humans. Bringing one home as a pet can never be recommended. Adventurers and scientists who come upon a cub that is either abandoned by his or her mother – maybe the latter was killed by a poacher – may be better off doing nothing to save the abandoned baby as other bears may take care of him or her. In the event that the cub is rescued and rehabilitated, the best that can happen is for the animal to be restored to the wild.
In the summer of 2014, I saw part of a nature program on polar bears in Canada, which showed an overpopulation of bears. This seemed to refute the idea of global warming. Maybe I didn’t see enough of that feature since ice in the Arctic has been melting faster in the last decade than usual. Sea levels have been rising and islands have been disappearing simultaneously. Record high temperatures have been posted over the last ten years and then have been broken again – all over the world. Do you think that hurricanes Katrina and Sandy were the result of global warming? Moreover, Dr. Stirling, who I mentioned earlier, conducted studies of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay and confirmed the existence of global warming, with the population of these bears dropping 22% since 1987.
Maybe these people denying this weather change are smoking something – I don’t want any of it. More likely, they’re not scientists or of the junk variety. It’s time to be reasonable. Either it’s happening or it isn’t. It has to be one or the other. Let’s suppose it really is happening and we take serious action to rectify global warming. We might make a difference. On the other hand, if nothing is done, life will be very difficult as the days march on. If global warming is not occurring, doing something won’t hurt in the least and may even be beneficial. If we take the lazy approach, we might still be all right, but the inattention could lead to future global warming. I think precaution and working now is the recommended approach. You can read more about it in the book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants Of Doubt: How A Handful Of Scientists Obscured The Truth On Issues From Tobacco Smoke To Global Warming. I doubt that the junkies have read the book.