B. 20??

The Lives They Lived

In 2003, the State of New Jersey allowed a black-bear hunt for the first time in 33 years. The resulting controversy, still smoldering today, seemed irresolvable: Depending on whom you asked, the hunt was either sadistic blood sport or noble tradition. Two sociologists, Dave Harker and Diane C. Bates, scrutinized 10 years of clashing regional newspaper editorials and letters to the editor and concluded that the two sides did not even seem to be arguing about the same animal. Actual bears had been replaced by “competing social constructions” of bears. Those in favor of the hunt imagined the animals as “menacing threats” that needed to be controlled; those against saw them as docile and benevolent creatures that just wanted to “live in peace.”

Each construction of the bear was then girded by the construction of subsequent constructions; the meaning-making escalated quickly. Voices opposing the hunt dismissed hunters as “uncivilized killers incapable of reason and unworthy of respect,” while hunters dismissed opponents as “panicky” suburbanites and “anthro-antagonistic wackos of the PETA-Qaeda cult.” With each side delegitimizing the other, actual dialogue seemed impossible. And everyone delegitimized the government, with each side believing that the state couldn’t be trusted to make a fair decision about the hunt because it was corrupted by the other. The entire episode, the sociologists wrote, “highlights how public discourse has fed intractability over the conflict rather than provided common grounds for consensus.” Bears are huge, immovable objects, made of bone and meat. And yet here they were, being swished around like ephemeral sock puppets on a plane of pure, post-truth subjectivity called New Jersey.

So that was the backdrop. Now enter Pedals, shambling on two legs.

The black bear rose to fame in the summer of 2014, after a man in suburban Oak Ridge filmed him toddling through the bulb end of a quiet cul-de-sac at dawn. Pedals, as he became known, appeared to be missing his right front paw, and his left front leg seemed warped and truncated — injury or deformity, only he knew. But he had apparently compensated for these disabilities by learning to walk upright, an image that produced both delight and terror. It all felt deeply weird. Especially because Pedals was good at walking. The camera tracked him as he moved in a sturdy lurch, covering a lot of ground, holding his dangling, unnecessary arms close to his chest like a mime absconding with a snatched purse. At one point, Pedals leaned over a garbage can, just to check out what was inside. Then he crossed a lawn and accelerated into a stand of trees. It was obvious where he was heading: internet fame.

At first, many people refused to believe that the footage was real. But even those who did resorted to describing Pedals as looking like a human in a bear suit — which, on the skeletal level, is a fair description of what all bears are. His humanness was uncanny and made our animal-ness feel suddenly uncanny, too. After all, we were quadrupedal ourselves until three to six million years ago, when a few of us reared up and decided to stop moving dumbly in the direction of our digestive tracts. It was our earliest signature innovation. Now Pedals was innovating, too — crossing some sacrosanct threshold of verticality, blurring some line. They didn’t contextualize the video like this when they played it on “Good Morning America,” but if the walking bear unsettled you, I’m suggesting that this is why.

More people saw Pedals. More videos surfaced. The question became: What should we do about him? Two local women, Sabrina Walsh Pugsley and Lisa Rose-Rublack, started an online petition asking the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to capture the bear and transport him to an orphaned wildlife center in upstate New York. By 2015, they had wrangled about 300,000 signatures from around the world, and they ultimately raised almost $25,000 to pay for the relocation. They ceremoniously delivered the petition to the State House and staged a small protest outside. Rose-Rublack worked in the world of domestic animal rescue — saving dogs, saving cats. It seemed obvious to her that a crippled black bear warranted the same compassionate intervention. There were reports of Pedals looking exhausted or frail. “We just wanted to take care of him,” Rose-Rublack says.

State wildlife officials saw things differently. “The bipedal bear,” as they insisted on calling him, was not a victim but a survivor. Pedals was getting around, foraging, denning in winter — successfully executing all vital bear behaviors. They were hesitant to wrench an animal from the wild unnecessarily and warned that what might, through a certain anthropomorphic lens, feel like rescuing could actually be imprisonment. One wildlife expert, unaffiliated with the state but frequently called on by the press — a Pedals pundit — summed up the situation nicely: “We process things differently in the wildlife community,” she explained. She and her colleagues were looking at the exact same bear, feeling the exact same compassion. But, she said, they drew a different conclusion: “We don’t think he needs saving.”

Every new Pedals sighting suggested that the state’s worldview best reflected the objective reality: He survived two winters; he was muddling through. When new footage of him appeared this June, wildlife officials noted that he even seemed to have put on some weight; they described him as “thriving.” But the wild card all along, of course, was New Jersey’s bear hunt. And on Oct. 10, it happened: A bow hunter in Morris County lugged Pedals’s body to a check station and weighed him in at 334 pounds. (Or what appeared to be Pedals’s body; the state won’t definitively identify any wild animal unless it has been tagged.)

One photograph, released by the government, shows Pedals hanging from a scale with a bloodied maw — vertical again, but this time upside down. The Department of Environmental Protection would not release the hunter’s identity. (When rumors swirled around one man, he says he received death threats.) And so it was impossible to know the circumstances: whether the hunter knew the bear’s identity before he or she fired; whether Pedals, who did spend some time on all fours, had been distinguishable from an ordinary bear; whether he had been standing upright in the wilderness, looking preposterous and conspicuous, and conspicuously like himself. That is, the bear’s posture — the very proof of his resilience — might have marked him for death.

It was never clear what we owed Pedals, exactly. You could argue that allowing Pedals to live in the woods and be hunted, like any other bear, was an act of respect — a validation of his wildness. You could also argue that it was a gruesome lapse of human compassion.

Pedals stood for something. We may never agree what it was.

Jon Mooallem is a writer at large for the magazine and the author of “Wild Ones.”