I’d originally meant to write a post updating one from last year on the best hockey-themed commercials from around the world. But in going through YouTube clips for new ads I stumbled across a Russian phenomenon I was not previously aware of — bears playing hockey:

That was no isolated video; there are several more, and some are quite recent. Here’s a bear playing with a human linemate between periods of a game in Magnitogorsk …

… and another at a very sparsely attended circus in Kiev:

What’s disturbing about this, besides the idea of bears performing for human amusement, of course, is how much bear hockey resembles real hockey, even down to the shoving match over a late hit in front of the net:





I recognize that I’m coming to this a bit late; several blogs came across this in the fall, and it was even on “Best Week Ever,” marking it as genuinely … something.

Last fall the bloggers seemed wary that the videos were a CGI trick, but they’re not. Hockey-playing bears are actually something of a tradition in Russia. Terry Jones wrote in The Edmonton Sun in December 1998 of the Moscow Circus on Ice’s tour of Canada, and how three Russian Oilers — Mikhail Shtalenkov, Andrei Kovalenko and Boris Mironov — went to a small rink in Clive, Alta., for a photo op with the bears:

Misha Shtalenkov, the Edmonton goalie, looked at Misha the Bear, wearing Vladislav Tretiak’s No. 20 in the Moscow nets and started to laugh. “I thought I recognized that style,” he said. “He plays exactly like Dominik Hasek. He puts his stick down and then he gets down on all fours.” Andrei Kovalenko followed Misha the No. 99 Bear (all Russian bears are named Misha) around for a skate, ready to turn and head for cover behind the nearest and juiciest looking photographer on the ice. “Passes and skates pretty well, but he looks a little out of shape,” The Tank laughed, failing to make mention that he resembled that bear last season. … Shtalenkov says Misha is a name everybody calls him and everybody calls bears in Russia. “Everybody I know calls me Misha. And all the tales for kids in Russia have bears named Misha all the time.” Shtalenkov had seen hockey playing bears before. But not up-close and personal. “I saw them on TV once. I think I was 10 years old. I think the Russian bears have been playing hockey for 20 years already, just like the Oilers.”

Actually, they’d been around longer than that. The Moscow Circus on Ice was founded in 1962, and as this note in a 1970 New York Magazine confirms, there were hockey-playing bears when the Moscow Circus on Ice appeared at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden.

The circus’s 1998-99 tour across the Canadian Prairies drew protests from animal rights activists who, like Michael Alvarez-Toye of the Calgary Animal Rights Coalition, pointed out that “teaching an animal to stand upright often means burning the pads of their front feet — it’s horrendously cruel.”

The circus denied accusations that it treated the bears cruelly, and the circus promoter at the time said the bears “stand up naturally” and were responding only to treats. Today the circus is under different management and does not advertise animal acts in its program.

But questions of animal cruelty aside. Are you disturbed by how eerily close bear-hockey is to real hockey? Does seeing something like that make you wonder just how different we humans are from the animals over whom we supposedly have dominion?