Why We Are Wild Animals

755 Words4 Pages

Our beliefs, culture, and needs as humans influence our relationships with wildlife and how we view each individual species as well as how we treat/preserve them. After reading Wild Ones, it is obvious that the author Jon Mooallem and the others mentioned in the book believe that polar bears, birds and bees are specific animals that deem worthy of protection. Mooallem provides many examples of people who give reasoning as to why we should help preserve these animals. Mooallem uses the specific people’s backgrounds to show the difference of opinions in someone who has knowledge of the animal versus someone that only adores the animal because of the animals looks. For instance, bears have evolved from scary animals that humans feared, to cuddly “teddy bears”. Some may ask how or why this is the case and there are certainly piles of evidence to support this statement. To begin, the bear itself was turned into a “teddy bear” named after Teddy Roosevelt because he could not shoot a bear. In this book, a man named Kelsey Eliasson was “turned off by the way he saw activists like Polar Bears International “Disney-fying” the bear”. This is significant because it then led to him saying “Now I don’t even know whether to believe in …show more content…

Dancing is seen as a form of entertainment to humans when humans are dancing never mind when a bear is doing it. Once a human sees how a bear can be taught skills like dancing, their opinion quickly turns from frightened to sympathetic. Eventually these positive views of bears are shown to children and eventually result in “handwritten pleas from children to save the polar bear”. Overall, human’s thoughts on the polar bear depend on how they were introduced to the bear. For example, if someone sees a bear doing harmless things like entertaining people, they will push towards saving them but, if they see a bear attacking a human or ripping apart another animal they may not care as much as to saving