Page 97 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Bear Requiem
Susan Cerulean

Despite a court appeal, dozens of demonstrations, and forty thousand letters of protest; despite

impassioned editorials in every major newspaper, and without regard for the opposition of three-

quarters of the state’s human population, nearly three hundred wild bears (including three dozen
lactating mothers) were gunned down in a “recreational” hunt in Florida, from the northern panhandle to

the Ocala National Forest, in late October. The event was strong-armed by Florida’s governor and his
appointed wildlife commissioners—a state-sanctioned slaughter of Florida black bears.

We hoped the bears would be wily, and escape the bullets of the hunters. But baited and tempted with

corn, birdseed and glazed doughnuts, they didn’t stand a chance.

How could we respond to the brutal slaying of animals only just

recovering from threatened status? What gesture could we devise to
transform our grief and our outrage, knowing that sixty traumatized

and orphaned cubs still wandered the woods? How would we reset a
moral compass in a state that presently appears to have none?

In Tallahassee, on November 21, a group of musicians, artists and
spiritual leaders—mostly women—created a memorial service not

much different than we might have had the mass murder targeted
human victims.

On the morning of the Requiem, I dreamed of eight bears, with all
manner of coats, some spotted, some gold, some brown. The

animals pressed against the glass windows and doors of a church,
apparently gathering for our service.

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