It's An Old Conan O'Brien Bit

It's not really for me to decide what a bear is for, or really any animal really. As I sit here typing this, I'm looking at a domestic cat (Felis catus, if you want to use the obviously fake Latin name) doing her most productive thing of the day, sleeping on a pile of unfolded laundry. If nothing else I can say she's at least in proximity to a chore, so I'm giving her grace points for potential, however biologically or temperamentally unlikely. If I attempt to categorize or even understand her in terms of utility, we're going to get into some very squishy subjectivity almost immediately. As far as measurable goals she might complete, she's too bendy and unbalanced to use as free weights and too mobile to function as a doorstop. All we're left with is "companionship" and "love" but a very convincing argument could be made that those are anthropomorphized projections borne out of need and breeding. We have the capability of inventing iPhones, rocket ships and a sophisticated artificial intelligence capable of clumsy plagiarism, but humans tens of thousands of years ago figured out how to make wolves look like human babies so we could tolerate having them around without feeling like you're being followed by a nightmare. All the retroactive Nobel prizes. Until someone these days announces they've come up with a pudgy spider you can take for walks and dress in a banana costume, I don't want to hear about how far we've come.

We never bothered to domesticate bears (or maybe we did, but it's a much shorter story with a bloodier ending), so their use is more safely tied to the generic use case for all undomesticated animals: to lure humans to their deaths in national parks when they mistake preoccupation (scrabbling for food, just walking with the cubs, etc.) for approachability. Just like humans interacting with other humans, give one enough to drink and they will immediately decode lack of immediate hostility for an invitation to approach. If there are any bison reading this, they know exactly what I'm talking about.

Bears will eat you, yes, because that's their actual use: being omnivorous apex predators in ecosystems uncapped by human interference. I know "apex" and "alpha" and shit like that gets misappropriated by himbos and the redpill brain-damage-is-a-feature-not-a-bug crowd of compensating hyper-mascs, but all it really means is you get first crack at the berry bushes. The ferrets and sparrows will make way because they know it's better to pick at the leftovers than become the protein portion.

Humans are the only creature to know real narcissism,* so still we have to figure: what is the use of a bear to us? I don't live in Yellowstone or a glacial cove or a new, encroaching housing development in a Denver exurb, all the natural environments bears are known to frequent, so I don't feel their effects.

And yet in China, in a zoo there, someone is maybe going to the trouble of putting a man in a hyper-realistic bear suit to wave at visitors. And, like... why? I mean, you can put four guys in an elephant suit, you know like most zoos do, and draw more of a crowd with something more spectacular and less obvious.

Because that's the point of bears: any bear in the right pose looks exactly like a human wearing a bear suit. And I defy a single one of you out there right now to find a picture of a bear in a human-like pose and not conclude immediately that you're a richer, fuller person for having seen it. And we didn't even have to risk life and limb over 2,000 generations to breed them into it, they just look like us. There's nothing we possibly love more than a thing that has taken the time and consideration to evolve into a fuzzy, potentially murderous version of our recognizable selves, up to and including exactly how we would act on 75 pounds of cocaine. We love a thing most when it's like looking into a mirror. And what goes together more naturally than cocaine and mirrors?

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*Allegedly. Don't get me started on horses, the preening pricks. I have some strong feelings, but they don't belong in a paper of this level of academic rigor.