Animal love: a man who lived with bears

           "At one point there were as many as six bears coming and going as adopted members of Jerry’s household, and never a problem, never an attack, never any aggression of any type. And yet this was too much for the authorities to assimilate into their neolithic heads. No one should be allowed to love and harbor such unpredictable and terrifying beasts. It was unheard of. And the uncreative, imprisoned, confounded consciousness of the cops could, in the end, no longer tolerate such a preposterous, unprecedented, and potentially dangerous event. And so one day the thick skulled gendarmes entered Jerry’s house while he was away and gunned down all the bears that were peacefully hanging about in what they had come to know as their home.  ...."

 

Excerpted from IN AND OF, by Jack Haas