subject: Blue Bear Plush [print this page] Blue bear plush toys are generally reserved for celebrating the birth of little boys, but there's no hard and fast rule that says little girls can't have blue bear plush as well. Soft toys shouldn't have a gender distinction given everyone's personal tastes are different.
In North America, black bear populations are distributed across much of the United States and Canada. They reach weights of about 300 pounds and happen to be a species that is often a problem for managers of wildlife because they all too frequently become habituated to human sources of food - getting them to stop is no easy task. In human communities where bears develop this issue, they become what's known as 'problem' bears, which leads to injuries to people, property destruction, death (of the bears), and relocation, which is both time consuming and costly. In California's Yosemite National Park, bears breaking into cars is an all too familiar issue.
It has been widely assumed that it was mother bears teaching their offspring to raid garbage bins and invade homes, but a study conducted in 2008, says otherwise. It specifically looked at how genetic behavior in black bears related to their conflicts with humans. Co-author of the study, Dr. Jon Beckmann has said "understanding how bears acquire behavior is important in conservation biology and devising strategies to minimize potential human-wildlife conflicts."
Work on the study was conducted on 116 black bears on the California Nevada border in the Lake Tahoe Basin and California's Yosemite National Park, where both genetic and behavioral data was examined. The bears were put into two categories: hooked on human food (or conditioned to food) and bears that continue to feed on natural food sources (or not conditioned to food). In addition, nine mother bears and their offspring were also the focus in the study to see if in fact they were teaching their cubs to eat human food.
The final conclusions of the study indicate that researcher's were unable to find evidence to support the bears with human food condition behaviors, had any link whatsoever to their lineage; bears that seek out human food do so because of what they have learned socially or, do it simply as habit because of their isolation from other bears. The mothers of the nine of the bears that were studied showed five of them (or 56% percent) did not have the same behavior habits as their mothers.
The next time you reach for a pink bear stuffed animal with the intent of giving it to a young girl, why not change things up and go for the blue bear plush instead? Breaking habitual norms is always a good thing and that young girl will quite likely be just as pleased with blue bear plush as she would have been had it been pink.
