But is it a crime to fight a bear? 

Adult, male black bears can run faster than Usain Bolt. Thirty five miles per hour. No sweat. They can sprint and jump and climb full speed up a one hundred foot tree in a matter of seconds. They can flip three hundred pound rocks with one forepaw and drag thousand pound carcasses with ease. Their muscle fibers are packed so tightly and can generate enough raw horsepower that they can tear open car doors like we’d open a refrigerator. They’re six feet tall standing on their back legs and they’ve got two inch claws built for digging and climbing or slashing. The average man would have to be insane to try and fight one in the real world. But in the world of fiction, this idea makes one hell of a fun premise to write about and during my research it brought up an interesting question:

Fighting a bear is crazy, sure, but is it a crime?

First, Brick Bridger, our hero in Bear Brawl, is not your average man. He’s 6’6” tall and weighs 265 pounds. He’s a two-time collegiate wrestling champion and had eight wins in the UFC before he retired. And he’s properly motivated. A rogue, 450-pound black bear killed his mom and put his brother in a wheelchair. 

The book explores what would happen if a man such as this dedicated his life to training, tracking, finding and fighting this bear with no weapons to get revenge. He enlists a zoologist, his ex-wrestling coach, local trackers and hunters and learns everything he can about this bear to prepare for the battle.

But unlike, say, Chief Martin Brody, in Jaws, who heads out into the ocean as a law enforcement officer to hunt the great white shark terrorizing his beaches, Brick is just a citizen. Brody puts a bounty on this one specific shark, overriding the laws that make killing, catching or removing a great white shark from the ocean a crime. Brick can’t do that.

Now, you might be thinking, “there are hunting licenses issued for black bears in many states” and you’d be correct. Hunters have been killing bears for their meat and fur for centuries. Just read Craig Fehrman’s excellent recent book, This Vast Enterprise, and the number of bears killed and eaten during the Lewis and Clark expedition will astonish you.

Still, hunting with a rifle and a license is a far cry from walking into the woods to fight a bear unarmed and as of this writing, there are no states that issue a bear fighting permit that would allow someone to do this. Interestingly enough, there are states that specifically ban wrestling bears: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Mississippi.

This mostly refers to carnivals and expeditions and circus-like events being banned, because it isn’t as if there is a queue of men applying to wrestle bears for amusement in the wild. On this front, in those states, if you were caught wrestling a bear, yes, it would be a crime. 

In Arkansas, where Bear Brawl takes place, AR Code § 5-62-124, considers wrestling a bear for “fun” or money “unlawful bear exploitation” and it is a Class D felony.”

So, did my main character commit a felony by fighting a rampaging black bear that had killed four people?

Not exactly, because there is a self-defense clause. Arkansas Game and Fish Commission Code 01.00-G puts the burden on the person who killed the bear to prove they acted under a “good faith belief” that they were protecting themselves or someone else from “imminent bodily harm or serious injury.”

This one’s dicey for our hero, Brick, because he specifically went into the woods to find and fight the bear. Fortunately for him, this particular bear was in the middle of a rampage and had just attacked a grandfather, grandmother and their grandson, which puts Brick on the right side of the law.

Okay, so now we know that the actual bear brawl in Bear Brawl is legal. Whew. The only caveat is that if Brick wins the fight (no spoilers) he better not be tempted to take a claw or a tooth as a prize. Why? Because even if you’re justified in a bear killing in Arkansas, as soon as you take anything from the carcass, you’ve gone from being a life-saving hero to an illegal poacher in no time flat, and now you’ve committed a crime again. Ha!

You’ll just have to read my thriller Bear Brawl to discover how this whole thing shakes out. Man vs. bear. No guns. No weapons. Just revenge. Part Jaws and part Rocky, it’s an action thriller that reads like your favorite blockbuster movie. And no animal fighting laws were broken while writing the book. I promise.

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