As the carnivorous chaos of Fat Bear Week descends upon us once again, a question loom as vast and weighty as 747 himself: Have we, as bear admirers, really sunk our claws so deep into superficiality?
We've unfurled an entire week dedicated to bear largeness, where titans like Otis, Holly and 747 are cruelly subjected to the kind of sizing up normally reserved for sell-by-date supermarket turkeys. Not without a wry grin do we spectate, mindlessly rating these magnificent creatures on their 'fatness', but is our chuckling hysteria masking a darker, bear-sized bias?
Now, just clasp your cave-dwelling sensibilities for a moment before I continue. I understand the hilarity of a hefty bear. I do. But beneath that laughter lurks a lumbering inconsistency, wilder than any Brown Bear. We've chided our own society for 'fat shaming', adopting body positivity mantras and executing social media crusades against marketing moguls who dare to suggest a size-zero model as the universal norm. Yet, we yawn a gaping double standard when we point and laugh at an overweight Otis.
The wild saga steeped in hypocrisy veers even further into the absurd when we consider the young, impressionable bears. Rather than encouraging them to play, frolic and learn, we blatantly stage a Fat Bear Junior contest, thrusting these poor cubs onto a platform of derision. By egregious implication, we're setting them up to aspire to an unhealthy extent of corpulence, as if this were the only way a bear could attain fame or acceptance from the ruthless, bipedal jury on the other side of the park fences.
Therein lies the heart of this feral faux pas: When we laugh at a bear's bulge, we're not just mocking them, but denigrating the very essence of their carefree, natural existence. Our jocosity, while seemingly harmless, is an encroachment upon their dignity, a backhanded slap at the pristine beauty of inherent biological diversity.
Before our species birthed the parallel universe of laughter, there was no 'funny'. Fun fact: 747 didn't get the joke this Fat Bear Week, and made no attempt to return the favor. Because, in the eyes of these scarred survivors of the wilderness, there's nothing amusing about pigeonholing their existence into our anthropocentric measures of 'big' and 'small', 'fat' and 'thin'.
So, let Fat Bear Week be a time to respect the wheel of nature that churns these wonderful creatures to their current forms. Celebrate bears, by all means, for their strength, their survival instincts, or their adorable cubs. But let's not turn our anthropocentric prejudices into an uninvited guest amidst their Ursine Utopia.
Next time you find yourself giggling over some particularly plump grizzly on your screen, remember that somewhere, a bear might just be contemplating your rather unnaturally tiny rabbit-sized waistline.
Based on: From hangry to chonky: Fat Bear Week is coming