Book Review - Bear Attacks: The Deadly Truth

I'll be the first to admit that every book written about bears has an agenda and that every author of every book written about bears has an agenda. Even I have an agenda. Only some of us are pushing an agenda for education, conservation, and co-existence, while others - like James Gary Shelton here - have a very different plan in mind.

Shelton admits from the get-go that he moved his family to British Columbia because he wanted to hunt the grizzlies there, then he makes several claims of wanting to save and protect bears, and then he backpedals again and says that the reason why bears attack people is because we don't kill enough of them to keep them in line. He then goes on to bash the study of bears and the conservation of bears, claiming that the logging and hunting industries have done more to benefit these animals than scientists have. Wait a minute....what?! That's probably the most ingeniously diabolical hidden agenda I've ever seen!

As if that weren't enough, many of the attack stories read like bad B-movie fiction. First, he makes the bears out to be much more sinister and scheming than any wild animal of any intelligence could be capable of and then he loses his last lingering shred of credibility by publishing the story of a hunter who claims that a grizzly ran after him on her hind legs at well over 20 mph. Wow. That's just dumb. A full grown grizzly can barely walk on its hind legs, let alone run on them. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

What's truly revealing is the fact that out of 25 reviews for this book on amazon.com, 19 of them are five stars, citing it as the best and most complete book on bears ever written, the only one void of an agenda, and the few reviews that pan the book are blasted with nasty, mean-spirited comments. Folks, if you ever needed any more proof of some of the claims I made in my previous post, there you have it! Fear sells and this just shows how easily people are willing to buy into it. There are plenty of books about bears out there and all of them contain some measure of useful information, but I can't even seriously begin to recommend this one...not even for a laugh.