This Big Bear Is In A Good Mood And Waves At People Passing By

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Finding or having a connection with animals is something that most people love to have in life. Being able to watch them perform some funny act makes it that much more enjoyable. Whether we’re at SeaWorld and watching dolphins perform tricks in the water, at the circus seeing a tiger leap through a ring of fire, or at a petting zoo and having a goat come up and kiss us. 

Well, we see this happening in the video just above, and let’s see how much the tourists loved it.

Brown Bear Waves at Tourists

At the start of this video, we are taken to some type of animal enclosure. It could be a self-driving zoo or even a conservatory of some kind. There is a massive brown bear that is behind this fence. And he is the fluffiest most adorable bear we have ever seen. He’s down on all fours until suddenly one of the tourists that is filming him starts to talk.

“Hello, bye!” Abruptly, the bear gets up on his hind legs and comes to attention to look at those passing by who is giving him the attention he so desperately wants. Another tourist pipes in, “Hey bud!” And the brown bear starts to wave his massive paw back and forth.

According to the United States Geological Survey, a grizzly bear’s paw was measured at 17 inches long. To put this into perspective, a man’s hand is approximately 7.6 inches in length. So, seeing this giant paw waiving back and forth is definitely making these tourists’ day that much brighter.

One YouTube follower comically added “Why do we raise our paw every time a human passes by?”… “I don’t know why, all I know is that they love it.” And we sure do love to watch animals try their best to connect with us as humans.

Do Bears View Humans As Prey? 

We’re taught when watching movies that all bears are sniffing out humans to hunt them down and kill them. Well, we know this is mostly fiction because bears genuinely just want to be left alone. However, we would be remiss if we didn’t discuss that bears are wild animals that can view humans as prey. 

Typically when we think of this our minds go to the black bear (U. americanus) and grizzly bear (U. arctos). However, the bear with the most aggression toward seeing humans as prey is the polar bear (Ursus maritimus).

A system called the Polar Bear-Human Information Management System (PBHIMS) was created to collect information and determine any conflict that may exist. “From 1870–2014, we documented 73 attacks by wild polar bears, distributed among the 5 polar bear Range States (Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and United States), which resulted in 20 human fatalities and 63 human injuries.”  

The goal of PBHIMS is to gather further understanding of these conflicts and how we can better protect the lives of polar bears and humans in these interactions. In the end, we need to respect the power that bears can wield, and know that we as humans need to give them their space and not antagonize or scare them.