Bear Baiting: A Book For These Times by Crendall Fenhew, Harley Golp, and Lattimore Freth, DSC (Haughtily Miffed; 225 pp. $23.95)
Rather than review this engrossing and large-worded book in its full-paged entirety, I thought I would summarize it from memory.
OLD WORLD
300 AD – Bear baiting (ursus tauntum) first described by Tacitus Publius Nuisance: “Hounds attack a staked bear before spectators. Refreshments.” In the absence of cruelty to humans, Romans never quite get into it. Bears opposed.
900: Woodcuts show bear baiting in medieval England and in France. Also, heartbreakingly, in Hibernia, where several bears flee in rough-hewn canoes thinking Ireland had no “stakes.”
1072: Spain. Alfonso VI of Léon and Castile adds crowd-pleasing torment by ordering hounds dressed as Goldilocks.
1583: Stands collapse, killing spectators at a bear-baiting in London. 7 killed, many injured. Puritans, demonstrating moral sense that will henceforth characterize them, declare God struck the stands because event was held on a Sunday.
16th– 17th c. England: Henry VIII quite enjoys bear baiting, (he opens a pit at Whitehall – today a Forever 21 store,) as does Elizabeth I, whose large white neck ruff is often spattered with bear blood from the times Her Majesty enthusiastically leaps from the Royal Box to nip at the beast herself, with the bear turning to the judges, like, “Hey, come on… this too?”
1604, city of Edo: Tokugawa Shogunate creates additional layer of cruelty by forcing bear to perform karaoke at half-time.
1710-50: Variations on the activity found throughout Europe include: blindfolding the hounds and lowering the bear from ropes, and “Newlywed Game” format with Lightning Round.
1770: Philip Astley creates the first modern circus, near Westminster Bridge in London. In the first year, 4,000 bears run away from home to join.
1824: Newly-formed RSPCA declares need for stirring popular tunes to incite public against the sport. Surviving sheet music from the era includes “I Saw Buddy Eating Grizzly’s Paws,” and “How Much Is That Doggy Tearing That Bear Apart?”
1833: Slavery banned in England. Bears that had previously escaped by disguising selves as hairy manacled slaves now find the tactic unavailable. Two years later:
1835: Bear baiting banned in England. Former slaves buy bears a drink amid much uneasy laughter.
NEW WORLD
1854: First American college bear baiting team: the Tuskeegee Taunters. League grows rapidly to include Carolina Maulers, West Virginia Worryers, and Tri-State Bothering All-Stars. Only protests arise from adjunct professors who are making less than the bear.
1861-65: Civil War. In ironic moments later immortalized in poem, novel and song, hounds and bears often find themselves fighting on the same side.
1884: Harvard fields a Varsity bear baiting team but withdraws when its bear is needed by the school’s medical department for experiments on the results of throwing a bear from a locomotive.
1885: Tuskeegee’s bear-baiting hounds unionize, win a 5-minute wound-licking break per hour.
1907: Nationals not held. Bear not feeling well.
1943: With many bears hired for Japanese internment camp security, bear baiters panic. Kidnapping of humans with suggestively ursine names to take their places creates shortage of Southerners named Bearston, Grizzleton and Fango that lasts to this day.
1945: To celebrate the end of WWII in a manner appealing to Northerner and Southerner alike, President Harry Truman commissions a combination cotillion ball and bear baiting on the National Mall. Bear briefly escapes by stealing a cadet cap and becoming engaged to short-sighted deb Augusta Manafort.
1980: Amazingly, some people still wondering why bears are generally out of sorts.
1982: Maya Lin’s Bear Baiting Wall goes up in Washington, DC, with the slogan “Never Again, Except In South Carolina.”
2010: Public bear-baiting in 21st century America only known to occur in Spartanburg, Hickory Grove and Travelers Rest, though back-yard bear baiting parties are still held in South Carolina privately. Political allegiance of organizers and participants unknown, but guess.
2017: Trump Administration lobbies to return bear baiting to 2018 New York Summer Olympics. Seems unaware, among other things, that bear baiting was never in the Games, that the next Games are not in America, and that there is no 2018 Summer Olympics.
