Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America by Jon Mooallem
Authors: Jon Mooallem
Ads: Link
black leather headband. Eventually, he cleared off his passenger seat and I got in.
The place is essentially a tumbledown, drive-through safari, and the disorderliness of it was only heightened by this imperturbable guy in the weird headband claiming to have everything under control. “I make sure the bears don’t molest the people, and the people don’t get themselves grabbed,” he told me as we resumed his rounds. Soon a bear rose up from the roadside and walked toward his side of the truck. “That’s a twelve-hundred-pounder right off the hoof, eh?” Ladoon said casually. He slapped his horn twice, but the bear kept coming. When it got within a few feet, Ladoon leaned out his window, revved his engine, and shouted at the animal. His stoner drawl exploded into a deep, low growl. He said, “No, you asshole!”
At that, the bear dropped its head. Instantly, all menace drained out of the animal. I watched it lope away, lie on its stomach, cross its paws into a cushion, and slump its head in them. The bear kept eyeing us, but it looked chastened, like a dog who’d been bad. It was amazing. “He knows,” Ladoon said softly. “He knows.” Often, he told me, all he has to do is pump the action on his shotgun and most bears will back up at the sound of it—he’s got them “trained.” Ladoon grinned at his weapon in between our two seats and the rounds of cracker shells and rubber bullets. “They know there could be anything coming after that,” he said. “You know what I mean? ‘Here comes the salad, boys! First course!’”
It was an open secret in town that Ladoon was also keeping the bears in check by feeding them, which is illegal. He adamantly denied it. But even friends of Ladoon’s, like Paul Ratson and Dennis Compayre, discussed this with me freely. (Ladoon also explained his bear-feeding regimen to
Canadian Geographic
magazine in 1997.) Biologists I met in Churchill tended to regard him as a low-life bear-baiter who uses his dogs as a front to keep collecting payments at his gate; they worry that he’s teaching the bears to associate humans and dogs with food, which will lead to more encounters and conflict. But many locals just see Ladoon as an eccentric, if unflattering, fact of small-town life. Churchill’s mayor, Mike Spence, suggested I bring my daughter, Isla, to Mile 5 when she and my wife got to town. “It’s like a Sunday drive through the park, so to speak,” Spence said. “She’ll be amazed at how big the bears are.”
As we drove, Ladoon explained that wildlife photographers and camera crews have been coming to photograph and film bears at his dog yard since the eighties. He bragged that some of the world’s most recognizable polar bear pictures, including several magazine and book covers, originated here, and began to explain why the particular access to polar bears he provides is so invaluable.
As photographers discovered Churchill in the eighties and nineties, they also discovered stock agencies and magazines with a large appetite for their polar bear pictures. But eventually, with the advent of digital photography, it no longer took skill to capture a white bear in a white landscape at the right exposure—anyone could do it. By now, one photographer told me, “Polar bears have been photographed to death.” So many photographers shot bears in Churchill that they’d nearly obliterated the demand for those pictures, just as hunters can shoot so many animals they obliterate the supply. More important, photo editors found that they could afford to be picky, and that so many of the pictures pouring out of the town looked identical and somehow wrong. They all peered down on polar bears from the high deck of a Tundra Buggy, minimizing the animal. And their backgrounds were laced with Tundra Buggy tire tracks and dirt roads, spoiling the image of polar bears as lonely rogues in a wide and desolate wilderness.
At Ladoon’s, though, the bears turned up just as reliably as in
The place is essentially a tumbledown, drive-through safari, and the disorderliness of it was only heightened by this imperturbable guy in the weird headband claiming to have everything under control. “I make sure the bears don’t molest the people, and the people don’t get themselves grabbed,” he told me as we resumed his rounds. Soon a bear rose up from the roadside and walked toward his side of the truck. “That’s a twelve-hundred-pounder right off the hoof, eh?” Ladoon said casually. He slapped his horn twice, but the bear kept coming. When it got within a few feet, Ladoon leaned out his window, revved his engine, and shouted at the animal. His stoner drawl exploded into a deep, low growl. He said, “No, you asshole!”
At that, the bear dropped its head. Instantly, all menace drained out of the animal. I watched it lope away, lie on its stomach, cross its paws into a cushion, and slump its head in them. The bear kept eyeing us, but it looked chastened, like a dog who’d been bad. It was amazing. “He knows,” Ladoon said softly. “He knows.” Often, he told me, all he has to do is pump the action on his shotgun and most bears will back up at the sound of it—he’s got them “trained.” Ladoon grinned at his weapon in between our two seats and the rounds of cracker shells and rubber bullets. “They know there could be anything coming after that,” he said. “You know what I mean? ‘Here comes the salad, boys! First course!’”
It was an open secret in town that Ladoon was also keeping the bears in check by feeding them, which is illegal. He adamantly denied it. But even friends of Ladoon’s, like Paul Ratson and Dennis Compayre, discussed this with me freely. (Ladoon also explained his bear-feeding regimen to
Canadian Geographic
magazine in 1997.) Biologists I met in Churchill tended to regard him as a low-life bear-baiter who uses his dogs as a front to keep collecting payments at his gate; they worry that he’s teaching the bears to associate humans and dogs with food, which will lead to more encounters and conflict. But many locals just see Ladoon as an eccentric, if unflattering, fact of small-town life. Churchill’s mayor, Mike Spence, suggested I bring my daughter, Isla, to Mile 5 when she and my wife got to town. “It’s like a Sunday drive through the park, so to speak,” Spence said. “She’ll be amazed at how big the bears are.”
As we drove, Ladoon explained that wildlife photographers and camera crews have been coming to photograph and film bears at his dog yard since the eighties. He bragged that some of the world’s most recognizable polar bear pictures, including several magazine and book covers, originated here, and began to explain why the particular access to polar bears he provides is so invaluable.
As photographers discovered Churchill in the eighties and nineties, they also discovered stock agencies and magazines with a large appetite for their polar bear pictures. But eventually, with the advent of digital photography, it no longer took skill to capture a white bear in a white landscape at the right exposure—anyone could do it. By now, one photographer told me, “Polar bears have been photographed to death.” So many photographers shot bears in Churchill that they’d nearly obliterated the demand for those pictures, just as hunters can shoot so many animals they obliterate the supply. More important, photo editors found that they could afford to be picky, and that so many of the pictures pouring out of the town looked identical and somehow wrong. They all peered down on polar bears from the high deck of a Tundra Buggy, minimizing the animal. And their backgrounds were laced with Tundra Buggy tire tracks and dirt roads, spoiling the image of polar bears as lonely rogues in a wide and desolate wilderness.
At Ladoon’s, though, the bears turned up just as reliably as in
Similar Books
