Ep. 15 – Gay Bradshaw on Charlie Russell, grizzly bears, and the search for truth

In her forthcoming book Talking with Bears (Rocky Mountain Press, fall 2019), Dr. Gay Bradshaw tells the story of the naturalist Charlie Russell. “If the search for truth was the engine of Charlie’s life, then it was love that provided the fuel,” she writes.
(Photo courtesy of Gay Bradshaw)

Bears, like other carnivores, are typically cast as unthinking, emotionless killers. But the late naturalist Charlie Russell believed this tragic misperception hides the truth about who bears really are. Charlie’s life story changed how humans perceive grizzly bears. While other scientists and naturalists were studying bears from a distance, tranquilizing them and tagging them with trackers, Charlie chose to live — intimately and without harm — among bears for decades in far east Russia and in North America. His objectives were as different as his methods. “Biologists know a lot — how many calories a bear needs every day, their numbers, and so on. This is good information, but it doesn’t really tell you anything about who a bear is,” he told our guest. “I’ve never wanted to know about bears, I’ve only wanted to understand them.”

In her much anticipated new book, Talking with Bears (Rocky Mountain Books, fall 2019), Dr. Gay Bradshaw tells Russell’s story, built on a decade of conversations about, and two lifetimes devoted to, searching for the truth of who animals really are.  An internationally renowned expert on animal trauma and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, Dr. Bradshaw has spent her life exploring the minds, emotions and lives of animals, and pushing and inspiring science and society to better understand them.

“Very conservative neuroscience does document and does demonstrate that non-humans have the same brains and processes in their brains that govern our consciousness and our emotions and thoughts,” Dr. Bradshaw says. But “our society, our relationships and everything reify and strengthen and reinforce [seeing them as ‘other’].”

Her expertise includes the effects of violence on and recovery of elephants, grizzly bears, chimpanzees, orcas, parrots, and other animals suffering from human violence, both in the wild and in captivity. Early in her career, she made the ground-breaking discovery of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in free-living elephants — which is the topic of her Pulitzer-Prize-nominated book Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity. Her most recent book, Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Beings Really Are, is an equally magnificent call for correcting how we think about and co-exist with carnivores. She is also the author of The Elephant Letters: The Story of Billy and Kani, which tells the stories of two African elephants, one wild and one captive, born on the same day. Dr. Bradshaw holds doctorates in both ecology and psychology and has taught, lectured and written widely about these fields in the U.S. and around the globe for over three decades. She is the founder and director of The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence in Jacksonville, Oregon, where she lives and runs The Tortoise and The Hare Sanctuary.

The fields of wildlife biology, neuroscience and human psychology have long been separated into silos. Science acknowledges human similarity to animals in theory and in experimentation — we acknowledge they are so much like us that they can serve as models for our psychiatric diseases — but, as Dr. Bradshaw points out, that neuro-scientific similarity has failed to translate into ethical parity. In response to this asymmetry, Dr. Bradshaw founded the paradigm-shifting field of “trans-species psychology,” which is the unified study of animal and human minds and experience.

“What’s influenced me is the people I’ve met, both human and nonhuman,” Dr. Bradshaw says.

Dr. Bradshaw is the rare combination of first-rate scientist, gifted storyteller, moral visionary, and blazingly original thinker — dedicated to understanding who animals are and uninhibited by traditional orthodoxy. As her friend, the bear expert Charlie Russell wrote, “What most strikes me about Gay and her work and what makes her stand out is that I saw that she was telling the truth. In that way she was just like another one of my bears and very unlike most other scientists. Using the careful logic of science, Gay painstakingly and eloquently rights the record.”

“Most of the bears we see here in North America have sustained one or two events of trauma,” Dr. Bradshaw says. “I would hazard to say that he majority of bears in North America have had their mothers shot, seen a bear shot, been shot at, been snared, etc.” (Photo courtesy of Gay Bradshaw)
“Charlie Russell was the chief architect for changing how grizzly bears are perceived today,” Dr. Bradshaw writes. “Old out-of-step-with-reality rules and regulations are still in place, but they have lost their monolithic power over public opinion. His gentle narratives forever vanquished the myths that have imprisoned bears in the amber of human prejudice. Charlie’s seventy-six years living intimately among grizzlies, unscathed, on the continents of Russia and North America are testimony of his rectitude.”
Bradshaw’s most recent book, Carnivore Minds (2017), dispels myths about predators by exploring the emotional lives of bears, white sharks, rattlesnakes, pumas, orcas and other animals.
One of the rescued desert tortoise at The Tortoise and The Hare Sanctuary, which Dr. Bradshaw runs in Jacksonville, Oregon. (Photo courtesy of Gay Bradshaw)

Recommended exemplars:

Chauncey Goodrich

David Bohm

Charlie Russell

Vine Deloria Jr

Daphne Sheldrick

Recommended films:

The Sorrow and the Pity

A French Village

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