Bears

I've been thinking about bears.

Actually about dancing bears. There's an old Russian saying, "It's not how well the bear dances, it's that he dances at all."

So how do you teach a bear to dance?

I think it involves some fairly unpleasant things. First you give the bear a ball, and you get it to enjoy playing with the ball. Bears like balls.

Then you put the ball on a rope and tie it to a stick. You dangle the ball just out of the bear's reach and you get it to stand up to reach the ball. The trick is knowing when to give the bear the ball in order to keep him interested in standing up and following it around. If the bear thinks he can't ever get the ball, then he'll give up chasing it, but if he always gets the ball he'll just wait for it to come to him. It's a painstaking process, this getting a bear to dance.

Eventually, you take away the ball and leave the stick. The bear forgets there ever was a ball, he just knows that for some reason he likes to stand up and follow that stick around. At that point you're ready to show your dancing bear to the world. The world doesn't say, "What a mean and awful person, this man who tricked this bear into chasing a stick around a circus ring."

Nope.

They say, "Ooh, look honey, a dancing bear."