Just a beast and then a cuddly toy: the 26th US President played a decisive role in this wondrous transformation. Theodore Roosevelt was a passionate hunter. In 1902 he unexpectedly discovered his sympathy for the creature: a Bear cub ran in front of his gun. The President didn’t pull the trigger. At least that’s how the legend goes.

From then on, cartoonist CK Berryman adorned his Roosevelt caricatures in the Washington Post with a little bear. And because Roosevelt’s nickname was Teddy, so did the little bear.

The first teddy bears soon found their way into children’s rooms. The domestication of the bear using plush and cloth was unstoppable. To this day, teddy bears are among the favorite companions of human children. Samples indicate that many adults also cherish a stuffed bear.

The triumph of the bear in popular culture was completed by 1926 at the latest, when the children’s book “Pooh the Bear” by the Englishman Alan Alexander Milne was published. The author was inspired by his son’s teddy bear. In Disney’s cartoon “The Jungle Book” from 1967, good-natured Baloo tries to be cosy.

Who is at the bottom of the food chain?

Advertising didn’t want to take a back seat to so much bear luck: With the slogan “Nothing beats a bear brand”, the good alpine milk flowed into the coffee in the sixties, which a shaggy creature dragged around in wooden tubs on lush green meadows. The Hustinettenbär from Beiersdorf AG stomped out of the forest at about the same time and stopped any irritation of the throat. Gummy bears tasted good to the Germans even before a blond, curly-haired entertainer praised them with a broad grin.

Whereby the connection between humans and bears remains ambiguous in the case of fruit gums: After all, it is about eating and being eaten. That’s what encounters with real bears have always been about. Normally, humans eat the animal – see grilled bear paws at Old Shatterhand’s campfire.

However, it is not always clear who is at which end of the food chain. And there we are with the so-called problem bears, who are primarily targeted by conservative Christian politicians in Bavaria as a media target.

The most famous is brown bear Bruno. He was shot in 2006 and ended up in a Munich museum as a stuffed symbol of the difficult relationship between humans and nature. Bruno had killed at least 21 sheep, three chickens, three pigeons, a rabbit and a guinea pig. He didn’t kill a person – unlike the bear that an unfortunate jogger came across in Trentino in April this year.

The French ethnologist Nastassja Martin wrote what is probably the most vivid account of the collision between bears and humans. She was attacked by one on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in 2015. In her book “Believe in the Wild” she tells of her encounter: She thinks “of his teeth closing over my face, of my cracking jaw, my cracking skull, of the darkness that reigns in his mouth, of his damp heat and his strong-smelling breath, the slackening of the pressure of his teeth, my bear suddenly inexplicably changing his mind, his teeth will not be the instruments of my death, he will not devour me”.

Martin has forgiven the bear. She has clarified her relationship with this species. In principle, this looks different. We fall into hysteria – regardless of whether a bear’s paw print is found on German soil or a small polar bear dies in the zoo. The relationship with the bear remains difficult. This could be due to his good reputation, which is hardly compatible with aggressive behavior.

The situation is different with the supposedly bad wolf, which returned to us a good 20 years ago. It was the wolf that ate Little Red Riding Hood, not the bear. In fairy tales we get to know him as lovable. He may be clumsy and clumsy, but at heart, Master Petz is a good fellow.

Bear myths date back thousands of years

Bear myths date back thousands of years. Two female bears served as nurses for little Zeus. Brave warriors in Norse sagas descended from bears. The bear was not only a cultic creature, immortalized in cave paintings, not only among Indian tribes.

The bear may also have fascinated people because it resembles it so much. The bear can stand up and walk on two legs. Its front paws look like two hands. In his “Brief History of the Bear”, author Bernd Brunner suspects that this similarity shaped the relationship. The Sami people called the bear the “old man with the fur robe”.

This robe became the bear’s undoing the more effectively the humans killed. The extermination took its course. The last wild brown bear in Upper Bavaria is said to have been shot in 1835 – until Bruno stopped by from northern Italy. Today, the brown bear in Europe is still primarily at home in Romania, Bulgaria or Scandinavia.

Some conspecifics hit and still hit worse than death. At fairs they were sent as dancing bears over glowing coals. In China and Vietnam, bears vegetate on farms in miserable conditions. Bile, which is considered a medicinal remedy, is extracted from them by means of a metal tube driven into their bodies. The animals do not survive this torturous procedure for long.

Whichever way you look at it: in our long history together, humans have treated bears worse than vice versa. More people die from wasps, wild boar or cows than from bears. But we are just as unprepared for the bear’s return to our native (Alpine) forests as we were for the wolves that had migrated back.

Environmentalists complain about the lack of scientific documentation. Why aren’t bears tagged with transmitters to better assess their behavior? And why aren’t forest visitors given standard, practicable rules of conduct? Tie bear bells to your backpack! Make yourself noticed with shouts! Have pepper spray ready! And please don’t go geocaching off-trail after dark!

Under no circumstances should anyone who encounters a bear run away. Experts strongly advise playing dead if the worst comes to the worst. Leonardo DiCaprio, as a trapper in the movie “The Returnee” (2015), did an exemplary exercise of how this works, although he almost let himself be mauled in the process.

Animal filmmaker Andreas Kieling was recently attacked in the Romanian Carpathians and suffered injuries. “The bear is fine,” he wrote afterwards. He himself was the intruder, the bear just followed his instincts. Playing dead is likely to overwhelm less experienced forest walkers than Kieling. However, incidents are said to have occurred in which hikers and bears lay peacefully side by side on the ground. They just weren’t equally relaxed.

Some have tried to make friends with bears. One of them was the radical animal rights activist Timothy Treadwell, better known as “Grizzly Man” in Werner Herzog’s documentary. Treadwell, an activist with a sense of mission, headed to Alaska’s Katmai National Park with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard. He named the bears, stroked them, lived among them. On October 5, 2003, he and his girlfriend were eaten by a grizzly. Apparently the bear hadn’t caught enough salmon in the river and was in a bad mood.

There’s an audio recording from the last six minutes. Huguenard had turned on the camera in the tent, but in his panic he must have forgotten to take the cap off the lens. Treadwell yells, “Come out, he’s killing me!” She yells, “Play dead!” The tent can be heard zipping up. The bear came back while Huguenard was treating her friend. Apparently she hit the animal with a frying pan.

Director Herzog observes the bears in his film, just as Treadwell did. But he comes to a different conclusion: “I don’t see any soul mates,” says Herzog, “no understanding, no mercy. Only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” Could a respectful treatment of this nature be a starting point for a thriving togetherness?