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Too be fair, we can kill them too. I bet people kill more bears than bears kill people.
In 2023 hunters reported harvesting 1,616 black bears in Oregon – 680 during the spring season and 936 in the fall
https://myodfw.com/articles/2024-spring-bear-hunting-forecast
Oregon has not documented any fatal bear attacks.
https://www.kptv.com/2023/05/24/bear-attacks-la-grande-man-after-he-shoots-it-twice/
Looked it up fairly recently (cuz you know men got mad about bears or whatever) but don’t have source on me: Black bears cause about 1.2 human deaths per year across all of America.
The only stories I hear about black bear related deaths typically involve some kind of “Messing With Sasquatch” moment on a couple of cubs.
I wish ancient humans had domesticated bears and bred them to be pet-sized
On a less jokey note, pretty much every living mammal has been subjected to domestication attempts at some point in history. Bears, elephants, tigers, hippopotami, moose… More often than not, there’s some kind of inherent physiological reason why it doesn’t work.
Some animals don’t breed well in captivity (pandas, famously, but cheetahs are another classic case). Some can’t handle captivity at all - the few efforts at keeping Great Whites in captivity ended with the animals bludgeoning themselves to death on the walls of their enclosures. Others are consistently too aggressive to effectively tame (zebras, coyotes, chimps, elephants, and pythons are notable for all the historic instances domestication failed for these reasons). And some simply aren’t pleasant household companions - skunks, raccoons, and foxes are all notable for their powerful odors and their propensity to destroy the interiors of homes.
There’s some speculation as to whether cats ever were actually domesticated successfully, or whether we’ve simply chosen to ignore their feral habits as such.
