Source: Town Hall
by Derek Hunter
“You always hear it after a bear or lion eats a person – they say they have to kill the animal because it now has a taste for humans and won’t stop. This always struck me as odd, even funny, as though we humans are so delicious that one taste of us is so euphoric that they couldn’t possibly go back to salmon, elk or whatever. That is, of course, not really the reason the animals have changed, the story goes. It’s that the fear of humans – their desire to avoid us because we’re strange to them – is gone, and now they will associate us with food. Whether that’s true or not, I have no idea, though I find it difficult to think one taste would alter everything they’ve instinctively done their whole lives.” (09/17/24)