Bottle-fed grizzlies make nice for science

But grizzly bear politics are far from the minds of the newest stars at the WSU bear center, Peeka and Kio, sister cubs who were born this year and are being raised the same way Mica and Luna were, with a few changes.

One of those is that they’ve been given pacifiers in the hopes that they don’t develop Mica’s annoying habit of sucking their palms like children suck their thumbs, which Mica picked up while she cuddled as a cub in the laps of her human “parents.”

And the lap-cuddling got cut off too. “We assumed they would grow out of it. Luna did, Mica didn’t,” Nelson says. “What’s cute now is not cute at 300 to 400 pounds.”

With Peeka already weighing in at 72 pounds and Kio at 89 pounds, the cubs don’t go home with Mama Lynne and Daddy Charlie any more, but they still have extensive personal contact with humans, both researchers and select guests, during the long summer days at the bear center.

Bottom line: Be good bears
Much of that contact is simply about teaching the cubs to be as well-behaved as possible when they are with people so that the scientists can have the “greatest amount of safety for the longest amount of time” as the studies proceed, says Nelson.

A typical visit with humans for Kio and Peeka begins with the cubs allowed to race from their dog-kennel-like pen to the adjacent exercise yard where they are greeted with baby bottles by Robbins and Nelson. The girls suck the bottles dry in a couple minutes and go romping around the roomy, chain-link enclosure like high-spirited puppies.

They roll and snort in the green clover, which they also eat in large clumps and dig in searching for rodents. From time to time, they tussle with each other, even standing on their hind legs to engage in an impromptu boxing match. When they tire of each other, they tumble between the legs of their human friends, drawing the stern commands of “Off!” and “No bite!”

Then it’s off to a plastic child’s pool where Kio and Peeka splash and ham for the camera as if they were trained in Hollywood. After soaking their thick, slightly silver-tipped fur, they rub and wriggle on the clover, drying their coats like delighted dogs.

Although Nelson, Robbins and their colleagues are free with affectionate pats, scratches and fond words for their ursine charges, they draw the line at playing with them, ever mindful that a playful nip or poke from a 75-pound cub is one thing while the same interaction with a 750-pound adult male grizzly would be quite another.

The whole point of the hand-rearing project is to keep the grizzlies available as long as possible for studies that are more easily done via direct human contact. How long will that be? “We don’t really know and we’re kind of waiting to see how they mature,” Nelson says.

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