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Review: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear
May. 7th, 2021 01:44 pmSo the popular narrative seems to be "the libertarians caused the bears." And certainly something seems to be going on in New Hampshire because Vermont has half the number of bear complaints and just as many bears. I certainly never saw bears when I lived in Vermont over the middle of the timeframe covered by the book despite a certain amount of wandering the woods barefoot. (Sidenote: don't do this.) But the book only partially makes a connection between the two--the woman feeding bears on her lawn certainly contributed, as did the "You can't mandate bear-proof garbage cans!" crowd.
But there were bear attacks in places that weren't Grafton, and every time the state Fish and Game department was called in they were emphatically unhelpful to the point where they come off as the real villains of the piece. There are two incidents of bears attacking women in their houses, one in Grafton and one not, and in both cases the game wardens show up and promptly engage in victim-blaming while doing nothing else, to the point where it often reads in much the same way police react to rape victims. Taking a cold pot roast out of the fridge in your kitchen isn't an activity that one should have to be concerned about, and neither is just existing in your house. They go to great lengths to make it the fault of the people who get attacked. "She had open cans of cat food inside her house and an empty bag of birdseed by her door!" The game warden doesn't even take a report on the first one, just checks off a "bear encounter" tick mark, which is a number that covers everything from seeing one in town to going through garbage cans to attacking your house, and all of these are reported exactly the same. (The second one has Fish and Game saying that it's not really fair to call it a bear attack despite the bear coming into her living room and charging her-- bear attacks are rare, doncha know.) All this while repeatedly upping the limits on acceptable numbers of bears in the state and doing nothing except saying "You are not allowed to shoot bears no matter how they behave."
The most fascinating intersection of the bears and the libertarians, to my mind, is the difference between the bears in Hanover and the bears in Grafton-- Hanover, being a wealthy town full of wealthy people and lovely infrastructure, gets immediate and expensive ways of dealing with their bear from the state, as the state relocates it and goes to a lot of trouble to dissuade it without harming it. Grafton, being filled with the kind of libertarian who doesn't have much money, gets ignored and dismissed by the state. As does neighboring Groton, which is a town similar to Grafton but with actual infrastructure. The Hanover bear isn't actually behaving any differently from the Grafton bears-- if anything it's less aggressive-- and they initially just wanted to euthanize it. When the town residents, who've named it, put up a fuss about this, they spend a lot of money to relocate it twice, and it finds its way back each time.
Meanwhile Grafton can't even get the state to admit the bear attacks were in fact bear attacks.
The book is about half ridiculous hijinks of libertarians as the town slowly spirals into a giant mess, and half bears. Occasionally you get things like the bear posse that goes around to every known den and kills them all one winter, but that was explicitly not the libertarians. (And the reporter repeatedly talks to people who refuse to talk to him and also make it known that they own guns and places where a body will never be found when he inquires about it.) But it really does seem more like the libertarians and the bears just kind of... happened simultaneously. The town definitely did break when the libertarians showed up, though; the population has now dropped dramatically from what it was pre-incursion, as the lowering and lowering of taxes and disappearance of a tax base made it impossible to even maintain cleared roads.
I remain incredibly amused by the description of a guard llama just completely owning a bear that tries to come after its herd.
But there were bear attacks in places that weren't Grafton, and every time the state Fish and Game department was called in they were emphatically unhelpful to the point where they come off as the real villains of the piece. There are two incidents of bears attacking women in their houses, one in Grafton and one not, and in both cases the game wardens show up and promptly engage in victim-blaming while doing nothing else, to the point where it often reads in much the same way police react to rape victims. Taking a cold pot roast out of the fridge in your kitchen isn't an activity that one should have to be concerned about, and neither is just existing in your house. They go to great lengths to make it the fault of the people who get attacked. "She had open cans of cat food inside her house and an empty bag of birdseed by her door!" The game warden doesn't even take a report on the first one, just checks off a "bear encounter" tick mark, which is a number that covers everything from seeing one in town to going through garbage cans to attacking your house, and all of these are reported exactly the same. (The second one has Fish and Game saying that it's not really fair to call it a bear attack despite the bear coming into her living room and charging her-- bear attacks are rare, doncha know.) All this while repeatedly upping the limits on acceptable numbers of bears in the state and doing nothing except saying "You are not allowed to shoot bears no matter how they behave."
The most fascinating intersection of the bears and the libertarians, to my mind, is the difference between the bears in Hanover and the bears in Grafton-- Hanover, being a wealthy town full of wealthy people and lovely infrastructure, gets immediate and expensive ways of dealing with their bear from the state, as the state relocates it and goes to a lot of trouble to dissuade it without harming it. Grafton, being filled with the kind of libertarian who doesn't have much money, gets ignored and dismissed by the state. As does neighboring Groton, which is a town similar to Grafton but with actual infrastructure. The Hanover bear isn't actually behaving any differently from the Grafton bears-- if anything it's less aggressive-- and they initially just wanted to euthanize it. When the town residents, who've named it, put up a fuss about this, they spend a lot of money to relocate it twice, and it finds its way back each time.
Meanwhile Grafton can't even get the state to admit the bear attacks were in fact bear attacks.
The book is about half ridiculous hijinks of libertarians as the town slowly spirals into a giant mess, and half bears. Occasionally you get things like the bear posse that goes around to every known den and kills them all one winter, but that was explicitly not the libertarians. (And the reporter repeatedly talks to people who refuse to talk to him and also make it known that they own guns and places where a body will never be found when he inquires about it.) But it really does seem more like the libertarians and the bears just kind of... happened simultaneously. The town definitely did break when the libertarians showed up, though; the population has now dropped dramatically from what it was pre-incursion, as the lowering and lowering of taxes and disappearance of a tax base made it impossible to even maintain cleared roads.
I remain incredibly amused by the description of a guard llama just completely owning a bear that tries to come after its herd.
