Excerpted and adapted with permission from What the Bears Know: How I Found Truth and Magic in America’s Most Misunderstood Creatures, A Memoir by Animal Planet’s “The Bear Whisperer,” by Steve Searles and Chris Erskine, published October 2023 by Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. In the late 1990s, the snow-globe village of Mammoth Lakes, California, hired hunter Steve Searles to shoot and kill 16 troublesome bears. In the course of his preparations, the bears won Steve over, and he soon developed nonlethal tactics to keep them out of harm’s way….
