A bear described as 'extremely intelligent' is currently on a rampage in Japan, having escaped its supposedly secure enclosure. British wildlife experts, ever the voice of reason from a safe distance, have questioned the zoo's security protocols. But let us not be distracted by the proximate cause.
This is no mere lapse in zoological governance. It is a metaphor for our age. The bear, like some shaggy Nietzschean figure, has broken free from the cage of civilisation.
It embodies the return of the repressed, the triumph of nature over artifice. Japan, a nation of meticulous order, now confronts the chaos it thought it had tamed. The British experts, of course, offer technical solutions: stronger fences, better locks.
But the problem is not the locks. It is the very idea that nature can be locked away. We have bred a generation of zoological managers who believe that any creature, from a bear to a global pandemic, can be contained by protocols and risk assessments.
They are wrong. The bear's intelligence is not the anomaly. It is the system's fragility that is the scandal.
Every zoo is a potential Pompeii. Every wall a future ruin. The bear will either be captured or killed, and the headlines will move on.
But the lesson remains. We are not masters of this earth. We are merely tenants, and the landlord is a very.
Large. Bear.
