Intro

For the past several days, I've been working on the intro post for this blog, trying to sum up my interest in bears and how my fear of them instead became a passion for them. I wrote, re-wrote, and re-organized this post over and over and over. Two thousand words later, with no end in sight, I finally hit the wall. I realized that if I actually finished that rambling diatribe and posted it, the existence of this blog would become irrelevant, because within that unstoppable intro I had covered everything, every minor detail that I had learned about bears and how that changed my opinions of them, every single piece of information that I created this blog to discuss, and I had to ask myself whose story I was here to tell, mine or the bears. Re-thinking things I've put together a much better intro with a more clearly-defined hook to get things rolling and an appropriate lack of information so that I'll actually have something to talk about later. As we progress through this thing, my side of the story will be told one piece at a time.

In my honest opinion, the study of bears is one of the most narrow-minded and ignorant fields of research that one could ever become involved with simply because our understanding of them is so limited, as is our willingness to accept new thoughts and ideas about them. Over the course of the last decade, however, we have had no choice. Our understanding of them is changing dramatically and we are being forced to change our ideas about them as a result, as a wealth of invaluable information is opening up to us, information that stands to alter our preconceived notions of bears as sharply and as dramatically as our preconceptions about gorillas have been altered. The purpose of this blog will be to present this information, provide reviews of the best and most informative books on the subject, and hopefully correspondence with some of the top experts in the field will be possible later on. My hope is that the information posted here will be educational, eye-opening, and inspiring to you and that hopefully you'll understand that things need to change and why they need to change. Comments, questions, thoughts, and theories are encouraged and necessary for this blog to serve its purpose, so don't be shy.

In the meantime sit back, relax, and let's begin....