Theriophobia: “problem bears,” leisure, and living in bear country

Abstract

ABSTRACT This critical essay’s purpose is to spark a discussion about the perceptions and behaviours of humans regarding time spent in “bear country.” To do this, I will employ three concepts, the first of which is theriophobia, or “fear of the beast,” a largely dormant concept in academic literature since the 1970s. The second is the “ecology of fear,” or “the total impact of predators on prey populations and communities”. The position taken here is that humans create a “landscape of fear” for bears through a continued form of manifest destiny, prioritizing the human experience in the non-human animal’s natural environment. The third and final concept employed will be that of “wilderness gentrification”, expanding its current academic usage to suggest that wilderness environments can become gentrified both by people moving into the natural habitats of predator species, as well as by an (over)abundance of human recreational presence there as well; in other words, humans asserting their desires and prioritizing their presence in the wild over the existence of bears.