Which Bear Is Best?

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0:01About a million years ago, some intrepid black bears and ferrets crossed the Bering land

0:05bridge into North America.

0:06Over thousands of generations, the ferrets and bears on different continents became different

0:11species, but they still look and act a lot alike.

0:14But the American bear and the Asian ferret are thriving, while the Asian bear and American

0:19ferret are at risk of extinction.

0:21Both sets of cousins owe their uneven luck to another intrepid species – a hairless

0:25ape that began its rapid spread some 60,000 years ago, eventually crossing the same land

0:30bridge into North America.

0:32As its numbers grew, many other species' numbers and habitats shrank.

0:35And everywhere it went, the human's big brain helped it develop the tools for success, but

0:39it also gave it all sorts of ideas about the new animals it came across.

0:43In Asia, people wrongly came to think that bear bile helped cure common ailments and

0:47started killing and imprisoning bears for their gallbladders, which they do to this

0:51day.

0:52Combined with habitat destruction, this has decimated the Asiatic black bear population,

0:55which has been cut in half in the last three decades alone.

0:58Meanwhile in America, many fewer people hunted bears after they decided that they were pretty

1:02cute.

1:03More recently, North Americans have also moved much more rapidly from farms to urban areas;

1:07the new-growth forests that are popping up in their absence happen to be the perfect

1:10habitat for bears.

1:12In fact, it’s so good that there are now about twice as many black bears roaming the

1:16woods of North America as there were when European colonists first arrived 500 years

1:21ago.

1:22The North American ferrets haven't been so lucky.

1:24Their primary food source, the prairie dog, was happy eating grass and breeding like crazy

1:28until ranchers – worried that there wouldn't be any nosh left for their cows – started

1:32killing off the liddle fuzzy wuzzies.

1:35With nothing to eat, the ferrets went extinct in the wild.

1:38Asian ferrets, on the other hand, have a favorite food source that humans haven’t killed off,

1:42and they’re still thriving in most parts of Europe and Asia.

1:44So, it’s not like the Asian ferret and the American bear are better species than their

1:49close cousins - whatever that even means.

1:51They just got lucky that humans in their part of the world didn’t decide to ferret out

1:55their favorite food or bear down on their bile.

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