Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A Historical Fantasy
An Archaeological Mystery
A Historical Fantasy
An Archaeological Mystery
Favorites
Blog Archive
-
▼
2017
(897)
-
▼
June
(90)
- Chefchaouen: Morocco's Blue City
- And the 76 Drone Swedish Flying Machine
- Justin Trudeau's Socks
- NSA Cyberweapons gone Feral
- Hats of Ascot
- Middle Earth, Hogwarts, and Modern Society
- Paul Grabwinkler
- Walker Percy Explains the Rise of Inequality
- Rembrandt, Crucifixion
- The CBO on the Senate Health Plan
- Dueling Studies on Seattle's $13/hour Minimum Wage
- Burma: What Democracy Can't Do
- A Roman Commander, Second Century CE
- The (Non) Domestication of Cats
- Piet Oudolf and Rick Darke, Gardens of the High Line
- A Definition of Materialism
- Pilgrimage Scroll
- Solar Power in India
- Jean-Léon Gérôme
- Health Insurance and Health: the Latest Science
- Bad Orcas
- Random Summer Flowers
- Racism, Liberalism, and avoiding Civil War
- Self-Branding for Experts
- Stonehenge Backwards
- Let's Get Back to Quilting
- Truth and Trust
- Yawns at CERN
- Emmanuel Macron and En Marche
- Solstice
- South Carolina Raises its Gas Tax
- Helicopter Parenting and Authoritarianism
- Altamura Cathedral
- Leaders and States
- The Onion Sums Up the Fall of Men
- Silver God
- Individualism Watch
- Today's Sentence
- Castle Sween
- Jules Joseph Lefebvre
- The Waste Land
- Human Sacrifice in Shang Dynasty China
- Advice for the Left from an Experienced Human Righ...
- Jails as Drug Treatment Centers
- Luca di Tomme, St. John the Baptist
- "Deadbeat Dads"
- What Helps Low Income Children Learn
- Our Unpredictable President
- Bear Teams
- Opening Fire
- Befuddled
- Kenan Malik: Cultural Appropriation is the New Bla...
- Classical Analogies for our Times
- Unsinkable Sam
- Casa Vicens by Antoni Gaudí
- Partisanship without Ideology
- Cows, Sheep, and Sea Floor Ecosystems
- Chinese Dragon
- Democratic Divisions
- The Oregon Trail
- Lilies
- Ok
- Qatar, Sarajevo, and American Hegemony
- The Random Political Ideology Generator
- Anxiety
- Pygmies and Cranes
- Russell Kirk's Ten Principles of Conservatism
- Today's Headline
- Noah Millman on the British Vote
- Baby Bird in Amber, 105 to 95 Miliion Years Old
- Night Traveling
- Eduard von Grützner, Mephisto
- Electoral Floundering in Britain
- Be Something
- 300,000?
- Opioid Lawsuits
- Names
- Shooting Stars
- Spurious Correlations
- Raising Tough Kids
- Summing Up Identity Politics
- Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Trump
- Health and Other Things
- Two Excellent Books about Ancient Civilizations
- Zhang Daqian
- Symbolic Politics with the Paris Accords
- Lookism
- The First Responsibility of Liberalism
- Ancient Pula
- Student Protesters and the Folly of Diversity Trai...
-
▼
June
(90)
About Me
- John
- John Bedell is an archaeologist, historian, and father of five living in Maryland. He has self-published two novels and is writing a third.
4 comments:
The Swedish Army once actually experimented with using moose in their cavalry forces.
Tests quickly showed that while they were fantastic at traversing harsh terrain quickly and quietly, and possessed great stamina and endurance, they were far too unreliable and difficult to control - particularly every year during the rut, when males become nearly insane, and utterly uncontrollable.
From what I've come to understand, bears are actually somewhat more domesticatable than moose are, particularly if trained from an early age. But they're not very useful or efficient creatures. They tend to become very lazy and listless if given a reliable source of food, and they're particularly lethargic in winter when they would normally be hibernating in the wild. They eat a lot, they're hard to motivate, and they're almost impossible to ride because of their skeletal structure and their loping movement. It also doesn't help that if they get scared or threatened, they can become a severe danger to their handlers.
You could indeed get them to pull a sled, possibly even at great speed, but why bother? Dogs are nearly as good and much simpler to care for and manage. Dogs eat a lot less, are a lot easier to train, are naturally more eager to please, have a natural desire to run around energetically instead of loaf around lazily, and are already domesticated and abundant. The only real downside to dogs is that they're not as strong, but realistically it makes more sense to just use bigger teams of dogs for unusually large burdens, than it does to go to all the trouble of using bears.
The drawing slightly reminds me of Philip Pullman's . Or was that the movie?
The Golden Compass, for those wondering what I'm talking about.
Indeed there is a long tradition of fantasizing about bears as companions. After all they look much like dogs and are closely related to them (they're closer to each other than either is to cats). I suppose the attraction is that they're bigger and stronger than dogs, they can climb trees, and they can walk on two legs. Plus there's the exotic element. But as G. says, this just doesn't work in practice; the root of the problem is probably that wolves are pack animals but bears live alone.
Post a Comment