Death to word play

S

o last week I received a press release from Glacier Park about a black bear that helped itself to lunch, grabbing food out of the open trunk of a car while picnickers enjoyed their own lunch nearby.

A brazen bear for sure, right in Apgar, which is not a good thing. A couple of days later the same bear showed up again and park rangers shot the bear.

The bear had a history of trouble, too. Last summer it got into garbage at Stanton Lake Lodge, was caught by Fish, Wildlife and Parks, they moved it to Big Creek and this spring, it walked back to Apgar and went right back to eating what it liked — human food.

I have no issue with them shooting the bear. You can’t have a black bear roaming around Apgar grabbing food out of people’s cars. Someone is bound to get bit, or worse.

But the Park Service said the bear was euthanized. It’s a word that game managers have taken to over the years. In almost every press release, bears are euthanized.

Merriam-Webster defines euthanized as a transitive verb, which means “to subject to euthanasia.”

The definition of euthanasia is “the act or practice of killing someone who is very sick or injured in order to prevent any more suffering.”

Now the bear was admitted a little on the thin side — just 100 pounds. But it wasn’t very sick or injured.

It was hungry. The correct term in almost all cases, is kill, which Webster defines simply as “to cause the death of (a person, animal, or plant).”

Glacier is not alone in its use of euthanize. FWP uses the term all the time as well. It conjures up this non-violent world where death is somehow pleasant. Death in wilds of Montana is rarely pleasant. 

In the natural world it is usually violent and if the victim is lucky, swift.

Years ago a researcher determined that something like 95 percent of all ungulates in the North Fork died from predation. They were killed and eaten by wolves, bears, lions and other critters with big sharp teeth or shot by hunters.

They weren’t, however, euthanized.