Name: 【TED】Jon Mooallem: The strange story of the teddy bear and what it reveals
Uploaded: 2014-08-03T09:40:10.000Z
Duration: 14 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

needed a little break from the White House,

to do a little black bear hunting outside of a town

The first day of the hunt, they didn't see a single bear,

but the second day, the dogs cornered one

after a really long chase, but by that point,

on the top of the head with the butt of his rifle,

to call Roosevelt back so he could have the honor

severely underweight, a little mangy-looking,

he just couldn't bring himself to fire at it.

He felt like that would go against his code

A few days later, the scene was memorialized

in a political cartoon back in Washington.

It was called "Drawing a Line in Mississippi,"

and it showed Roosevelt with his gun down and his arm out,

and the bear was sitting on its hind legs

with these two big, frightened, wide eyes

and little ears pricked up at the top of its head.

It looked really helpless, like you just wanted to

It wouldn't have looked familiar at the time,

but if you go looking for the cartoon now,

Essentially, toymakers took the bear from the cartoon,

turned it into a plush toy, and then named it

after President Roosevelt -- Teddy's bear.

about the invention of a squishy kid's toy,

but I'd argue that the invention of the teddy bear,

inside that story is a more important story,

and also about how, on the planet right now,

For us, in retrospect, it feels like an obvious fit,

and who wouldn't want to give one to their kids to play with,

Bears were something that frickin' terrified kids.

the bear had been a shorthand for all the danger

that people were encountering on the frontier,

These animals, they were being demonized.

One government biologist, he explained this

and so we were just clearing them out of the way.

In one 10-year period, close to half a million wolves

from 95 percent of its original territory,

and whereas once there had been 30 million bison

moving across the plains, and you would have

for four or five hours so that these thick,

living rivers of the animals could pour over the tracks,

now, by 1902, there were maybe  less than 100 left in the wild.

And so what I'm saying is, the teddy bear was born

into the middle of this great spasm of extermination,

were starting to feel conflicted about all that killing.

America still hated the bear and feared it,

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【TED】Jon Mooallem: The strange story of the teddy bear and what it reveals

change

climate

bear

president