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A black bear was shot and killed in London, Ontario yesterday, a city of significant size (400,000) that we live fairly close to. It started with a couple of sitings reported on the news in the early morning, in themselves news because bears haven't been spotted within a hundred kilometres of the city in a very long time. By evening the news had turned to reports that police had located the bear. It allegedly charged an officer and was shot and killed. The sitings had been taken seriously right away, the Ministry of Natural Resources had been contacted and the community warned. Community reaction was mixed. Some people were suprised, others shocked or down right outraged. Blogs, editorials and comments to news articles started to heat up.
Weighing all the facts appropriately, this was hardly man bites bear news. London doesn't have a park ranger, zoo keeper or other similarly equipped and knowledgeable professional sitting around waiting to leap into action just on the off chance a bear wanders into the city once every hundred years or so. The people with those skill sets and related equipment were too far away to provide timely assistance. Suffice to say, had something bad happened to an actual resident, the news and opinion would look a lot different. The decision to shoot the bear with the gun they actually had at their disposal was the bi-product of common sense yet it seemed unthinkable to a segment of the population who were primarily nestled safely behind their computers with no viable alternatives to offer despite having plenty of time and absolutely no pressure to noodle on the problem.
The bottom line is, they are sitting in the ever expanding "cheap seats" brought to them by the Internet. I'm tarring social media with a rather large brush here but in the context of this commentary, I define social media simply as any platform, site or tool that improves the usability and accessiblity of the Internet to the point where almost anyone can scrawl something on its bathroom wall. This is neither good nor bad really. It's more about increased sample size. We are rapidly getting more... more thoughtful and varied opinion, more experts, more creativity and of course, more uninformed idiots.
As it relates to our bear, if you take Jack Nicholson's court room soliloquy in A Few Good Men somewhat out of context, the fact is, he was absolutely right on a number of points. That bear's death while tragic, probably saved lives. Like Colonel Jessup, I would like for the good citizens of London to just say "thank you" and be on their way or at the very least, think twice before lobbing il-informed criticisms at police officers who eat breakfast a hundred yards away from bears who are trained to kill them. Who's going to trap or tranqilize that bear? You?
Either pick up a gun and man a post or get back to farming your digital vegetables on Facebook.
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