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Bear Baying

This NYT piece on bear hunt training in So. Carolina is worth a read for a number of reasons, not the least of which is this line from the Bear Man, Robbie Grumbles: ""People raised on the concrete don't understand people raised on the dirt. I just don't know how to explain it to them."
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The term "Bear Baying" appears to be a corruption of the more widely used term, "Bear Baiting." Bear baiting has many citations on Google and the Wikipedia entry describes the ending of the sport in England in 1835.

A search for "Bear Baying" turns up articles about the South Carolina practice, which I therefore assume is a local application of the older term.

The bear baying participants prefer the term "baying" because they, of course, want to distance themselves from the bear baiting of the middle ages and the baiting that still takes place in Pakistan today. But the practice does not deserve to be distinguished from baiting. Participants pretend it is a training activity for hunting dogs, teaching them to "bay" the bear, but if this activity was meant to train dogs to hunt bears (which it isn't) it would teach those dogs skills that would get them immediately killed. The bear used in baiting competitions has her claws and some of her teeth cut off (you can see that the claws have been cut off in the images accompanying the story - though the owner denies it) and is tethered on a short lead, rendering her absolutely defenseless.

Oh, Megan, why inject some unseemly facts into what was such a fine bit of macho Real American fetishism?

I suspect Mr. Grumbles is quite familiar with concrete life in various ways.

Much like the fierce warrior in a previous thread here about Man Vs. Bear - a real classic:

https://nlt.ashbrook.org/2007/06/the-marine-and-the-bear.php

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