Sometimes I Worry

by Diane

…about some of the people whose searches bring them to our sites.

On the Owlsprings.com site, at “Homeward”, our informal bio / biblio / homestuff site, is a story called “Bears.” It’s one of a series of short stories I’ve written (and continue to write) based in Switzerland, my “second home” and someplace I most dearly love. The story is fantasy/SF…sort of.

The story has been there for a long while now. What slightly unsettles me is the Google search which brought someone to that story today. Someone typed in these words:

“Is the polar bear aggressive toward treats”

Well, no, so long as they’re warm-blooded and breathing. Like YOU! This is the only ursine on the planet which is exclusively carnivorous. This is one of the few creatures on Earth which can only be hunted successfully, these days, with human beings as bait!

(shudder)

“Treats??””

(a) Who has these in their back yard and is seriously worrying about whether feeding them is dangerous? Alaskans, tell me it ain’t so!!

(b) Who’s considering going to their local zoo and throwing the PBs “treats”? Oh dear. Even the bears in Bern only get figs and carrots from the tourists. (Though there is a sign: “No meat, no soft drinks.” Like other such signs — the one in Stratford-on-Avon over the Avon that says PLEASE DO NOT JUMP FROM THE BRIDGE — it makes you wonder. Both about the courtesy of the British — only in Britain do they ask you PLEASE not to do what your mom always warned you about [“If Dairine said, ‘Let’s jump off the Brooklyn Bridge,’ would you do it??”] — and about Peter’s First Law: “If they have a sign telling you not to do it…however obvious and stupid it might be…then someone, sometime, did it.“)

…I’m still shuddering. Treats??? Treats??? Eeeesh.

The voice in the kitchen, carving the Thanksgiving bird, says: “You don’t need to run faster than the polar bear. You just need to run faster than the guy running beside you.”

Oh, thank you so much for reminding me. 🙂

(And a very late afterthought: whoever did that search might have meant “threats”, and misspelled it. Boy, I hope so. But Heaven knows I’ve had to fix all the meta tags in our food pages to deal with the constant misspellings “recipie” and “recipee”, and their rogue-apostrophe variant, “recipe’s”….)

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