Swiss Essentials: An Ambiguous View of Large Carnivores

To go to Switzerland is to visit a country extremely conscious of bears. Pretty much any time the Swiss see an opening for a bear in a story or an emblem, they will stuff one in. Deborah’s birth-city of St. Gallen, for example, was supposedly founded after a bear brought a bundle of firewood to a wandering monk, who decided that was as good a reason as any to found a settlement on that very spot. But even this distinguished pedigree does not win St. Gallen the right to be called “city of the bear”, since that honour was already reserved for Bern, which rather cruelly keeps live bears in a pen downtown. Furthermore, three Swiss cantons (including Deborah’s) have bears on their coats of arms, and given that these appear on every licence plate and passport, as well as on flags distributed around the principal towns, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that people in these cantons look at hundreds of images of bears every day.

And yet when an actual bear crossed over into Switzerland last year, the entire nation was in an uproar. Faced with the first wild specimen in the country in decades, Switzerland quickly formed a multi-national coalition with Austria and Germany to bring an end to the overwhelming security threat. As a team of seasoned bear trappers and Karelian elkhounds was hastily dispatched from Finland at several hundred thousand euros’ expense, divisions plagued the home front. Bavarian President Edmund Stoiber called the visitor Problembär, but reporters lovingly christened him Bruno, and covered newspaper front pages with stories of his frolicsome exploits. What could be done with him to appease both the grumbling farmers and the strident environmentalists? Finally, the Germans came up with a compromise they thought would please everybody: they would slaughter the bear, and everyone would go home. Some Swiss lamented this final solution, but many no doubt breathed a sigh of relief that they could once more enjoy their flags, license plates, statues, wall murals, and foundation myths in peace.

Incidentally, while all this was going on, I was in the Rocky Mountains with Deborah, who very courageously came hiking every day in spite of her overwhelming fear of our savage Canadian bears. But old Deborah wasn’t just going to walk into the jaws of death unprepared – no, she held the beasts back with a continuous litany of Swiss German children’s songs. “When the singing stops, we’re both dead!” I shrieked every now and then to keep her spirits up. We emerged each evening from the woods unscathed, and improved in our knowledge of kindergarten pop culture to boot. Why this solution never occurred to anyone in Switzerland, widely considered to be the Mecca of Swiss German children’s songs, is entirely beyond me.