The Whole Tail Tale
Monday, May 10, 2010 at 11:26PM Two weeks ago, youngest son and the dogs almost ran into a moose in the bush right above the house, and a couple of days ago a young coyote tried to play with the pup. It’s the time of the year, I guess, for running into wildlife.
All the wildlife talk has made youngest daughter afraid that she’ll have a bear encounter on her daily runs. It didn’t help things that oldest son saw two grizzlies while driving on Saturday. Today, then, she took the pup running with her. It’s for protection, she thinks, but I’m pretty sure he’d be no good in a bear attack. He may be big, but he’s a big chicken. I didn’t tell her that because he loves going with her and anything to use up some of his energy is a good thing.
So I’ve been thinking, you see, of this post from almost exactly five years ago. I’ve edited it, updated links when I could (some are gone forever), and posted it again because I can and I want to.
I take questions about my posts seriously and try to answer them whenever I can, even if it means I have to tackle controversial subjects. So when Kim asked a question about the length of bears’ tails (“….don’t bears have little stubby tails?”) on this post, I felt obligated to look into it for her. I had no idea that this would be the most controversial subject I’ve ever researched, one with more disagreement among the experts than even the Calvinism/Arminianism debate.
The experts do all agree on one thing: the official description of a bear’s tail is stumpy, not stubby. But they can’t agree on how long the bear’s stumpy tail actually is. The bear’s tail is “a small, furry flap of skin measuring only about 4.8 inches in length,” says the American Bear Association, while other sites give measurements from two inches to eight. I suppose it depends on the type and size of the individual bear.
I should to be able to answer this question from personal experience, but I can’t. I accidentally saw the back end of a bear up close once, and it wasn’t the tail I noticed, but the overpowering smell. Take my compost pile on a hot July day and turn up the smell control five whole turns and you might have something close to the smell of that bear. Bears, it seems, are not big on personal hygiene. This works well for them, at least if they’re looking to keep the precise length of their tails hidden from the casual observer.
