Grizzly Bears Are Mostly Vegan
But humans made them more carnivorous.
On the subject of grizzly bears, the San Francisco Call—a short-lived newspaper that went out of print in 1913—wasn’t what you’d call kind. Describing the 1898 downfall of a California grizzly nicknamed Old Reel Foot, a supposedly 1,350-pound “marauder and outlaw,” an unnamed journalist : Old Reel Foot broke into a pigpen and “sat him down in the midst of the squealing porkers until his belly was made full”; he infiltrated an Indigenous tribe to abscond with an infant in a papoose; he disemboweled and “partly devoured” a sheep herder while his young son watched—actions all motivated, according to the writer, by the bear’s thirst for revenge on humanity.
