Many years ago I took my four small children to the Pretoria zoo. There was a sunken bear enclosure with two bears in it. The words on the sign read: Ursus arctos horriblis. That’s the scientific name for grizzly bears. We spent some time there, leaning over the rail, throwing peanuts down to them.
Standing straight up on their hind legs, begging for the peanuts, they looked so cute, so friendly, the expression on their faces so much the antithesis of aggression, trustworthy enough that if allowed to, you’d enter the den with your kids — well perhaps not with your kids — and give them each an affectionate pat. You just knew those two bears wouldn’t harm a fly. They were just overgrown teddy bears.
Well, if you had been there and that’s what you thought, perhaps you should have looked again at the sign bearing the scientific name for those teddy bears: Ursus arctos horriblis.
Horriblis! That’s right. Horriblis.
So what do you think would happen to someone who ventured into a grizzly bear enclosure?
Well it just happens that someone did venture into a bear enclosure recently. I’m not sure if a European brown bear is a grizzly, like its American cousin, but I’d stake my bottom dollar on it, this European brown bear was a horriblis.
So what happened? Here, see for yourself.
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