Think Like a Bear (Hear Us Out)

Be true to yourself, even when it's really difficult, Karen Duffy (yes, the former MTV VJ) advises her cub...er, son. In this letter to him, from her new book, Wise Up: Irreverent Enlightenment from a Mother Who's Been Through it, she shares lessons on how to do just that, which she learned from her own challenging times, including being diagnosed with an incurable neurological disease and from some hard-partying bears.

- Karen Duffy

Dear Cub,

The Romany community of Bulgaria trained bears to dance for hundreds of years a medieval tradition that lived on as a modern vestige of the Dark Ages. These were brown bears, ursus arctos, known in North America as the fierce grizzly bear. They were plied with booze by their trainers, and they performed their infamous dances while schnockered.

In 2007, Bulgaria was admitted to the European Union. Part of the price of admission was banning all dancing bear acts, which were rightfully deemed cruel and inhumane. The retired dancing bears were moved to a special refuge. The team at the bear sanctuary had the specialized task of teaching bears to be bears-how to hibernate, how to hunt, how to have bear sexy-time. Food was hidden around the sanctuary to reawaken the foraging instinct that had been trained out of them. The Dancing Bear Park became an ursine experiment in freedom.

The sanctuary staff has had great success, but sometimes the bears struggle with the chaos of free will. The difficulty of making their own choices causes pain. At these times, the bears revert to the behavior that the rehabilitation staff were trying to get them to unlearn: When they see a human, they get up on their hind legs and dance a jig.