Unbearable

They’re baaack, and you don’t want to run across one.

I refer of course to Ursus arctos horribilis, better known as the grizzly bear.

Seems that the griz are returning to parts of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington since coming under federal protection.

That’s good.

What’s not good is what happens when a member of Homo sapiens sapiens — that would be you or me or another human being — comes across a grizzly bear. What happens is that the person usually wakes up dead.

That would be because your average male grizzly bear is 6 or 7 feet tall and weighs up to 850 pounds. Throw in hellacious claws and teeth along with incredible muscle mass — not to mention a nasty disposition — and you are talking one big-time killing machine.

In the last eight months alone, the Associated Press has tallied a dozen grizzly-human confrontations.

Incredibly, the AP said that among those incidents, “seven people were injured, some severely.”

Wow. Only seven? I didn’t know it was possible to tangle with a grizzly and not end up looking like a sack of raw hamburger meat.

Anyhow, with more of this happening, some folks out West want to be able to hunt the bears again.

They figure if grizzlies get scared of people, they’d be less inclined to think of them as dinner.

I dunno.

I would say this: If the number of grizzly bears continues to increase in the Pacific Northwest, people are going to suddenly remember why they wanted to eradicate these critters from the lower 48.

Personally, I’ve got no beef with the bear.

In fact, if they want to have Montana, I wouldn’t fight ’em for it.