The Parable of The Bear at Feeding Time

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, is it mere coincidence that every winter North Korea threatens to develop and use a nuclear weapon, or is there a pattern that might reveal an unspoken underlying motive?”

Josh spoke thus:

A crowd was watching a bear in a zoo.  A cardboard clock face indicated to the crowd that feeding time would be at four o’clock in the afternoon.  It was now five minutes to four.

The bear could not read the clock face.  The bear had at best a limited concept of time.  The bear had at best a limited concept of a clock face.  Besides, the clock face was turned toward the crowd and was invisible to the bear.

The bear, though, had another clock it trusted more than it would have trusted the clock face, were the clock face visible, had the bear even a rudimentary concept of a clock face, and had the bear a rudimentary understanding of time as represented through a regularly segmented division of an approximate solar day.  The clock the bear trusted was the crowd.

The bear, it was true, was an omnivore.  The bear by nature would scavenge a large part of its diet in the form of berries, fruits, roots, honey and even, in the case of grizzly bears in some northwestern areas of North America, moths hidden under rocks.  It is also true that the bear was in part a predator.  It behooved the bear to understand potential prey.

Were the crowd potential prey?  It would be a stretch to contend that the bear saw the crowd as prey.  But the crowd were indicators of imminent sustenance.

At a certain time each day a crowd gathered.  At that same time of day, food appeared.  The association was more than coincidence, and the bear, whose sense of cause and effect was at least marginally stronger than its sense of time, had no trouble making the link between crowd and food.

It was not surprising, then, that the bear associated a young person with food, when the young person leaned too for over the retaining wall, hoping one assumes for a closer view of the bear, and got a closer view of the bear than the young person presumably expected.  That is to say the young person was face to face with the bear.  And the bear was face to face with a young person whom the bear associated, not surprisingly, with food.

The bear sniffed the young person.  Was the bear sniffing the young person to see whether the young person might be food?  We will never know.  Did the bear sniff the young person to see whether the young person might be carrying food?  We’ll never know.  The bear will never say.

The gun shot from the crowd was sudden.  The gun shot from the crowd was loud.  The gun shot made the non-shooters in the crowd jump.  The young person crumpled dead to the ground.

“Why did you shoot the young person?” the police asked the shooter, “Why didn’t you shoot the bear?”

The shooter replied, “Which is the more dangerous species?”