Bozeman, Mont.
Tucked away just off Interstate 90 in this magnificent country is a facility the state of Montana calls a roadside menagerie. Inside are the cutest and most playful and downright cuddly critters you’ve ever seen. You want to hug them. You don’t, of course, because with one swipe they could send your head rolling across the visitor center like a bowling ball.
It’s called Grizzly Encounter, set against the rolling hills between Bozeman and Livingston, a wildlife center that counts as its year-round residents three humans, three grizzly bears and a pack of loud dogs, including a basset hound that on a cold and stormy November morning seems more than a bit concerned about the steadily mounting snow that is threatening to reach his, well, belly.
The wildlife center is a home for rescued grizzly bears – bears born in captivity and often kept in a shocking environment of tiny cages and enormous neglect. They have been taken in by Ami Otten, John Peterson and Casey Anderson, who in 2003 completed a 2-acre, concrete-walled enclosure of waterfalls and trees and boulders and drinking pools for the giants. Adjoining the enclosure are indoor sleeping quarters for Brutus, a nearly 4-year-old male, and 19-year-old sisters Sheena and Christi, who do not get along with each other.
“The girls spent too many years in a small cage together,” said Otten, who two years ago took them from a breeding center where they’d lived for 17 years inside a single 6-by-8-foot steel cage. “If we put the girls together now they’d fight. When they even see each other they growl. They’re such intelligent animals. I wonder if they think, ‘If we’re together again we’ll get shoved back into that small cage.”‘
Both females, though, are fond of Brutus, playing endlessly with him – at different times of the day – inside the enclosure. Brutus weighs about 675 pounds, Otten said. She has raised him since he was 2 weeks old at a grizzly breeding farm in Idaho where she worked. She would give not much more information about the place.
“Let’s put it this way,” she offered. “When their bears were of no use to them anymore, they took them out and shot them. When I brought Brutus here he was thin and terrified of everything.”
Not that Brutus still doesn’t have issues to deal with.
He has, for example, had a vasectomy.
“He doesn’t know he’s had a vasectomy,” Otten said. “He still tries to be the big, tough male bear. Right now he’s going from the terrible twos right into the juvenile delinquent stage.”
The facility is one of nine licensed by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks as a roadside menagerie. Two others also have grizzly bears. Most exhibit smaller creatures such as wolverines, badgers, porcupines and even skunks, according to Tim Feldner, the department’s manager of commercial wildlife permitting.
“One of our biggest concerns,” Feldner said, “is public contact with these animals, to have somebody in their prom dress having their picture taken with a grizzly bear or Bengal tiger, those kinds of things. We really hold the line there.”
There are no young women in prom dresses to be seen on a recent cold morning as Brutus awakens and wanders from his den into the large enclosure. His first stop is the watering hole, covered with a 3-inch layer of ice from the nighttime freeze. Brutus is thirsty and begins a steady rhythm of rearing up and slamming his massive front paws against the ice, trying to break through for a morning drink. Eventually the ice gives way and he guzzles from the pond. Then he slaps the 3-foot-wide slab of broken ice some 10 feet across the enclosure.
“He likes to clear the ice from the pond,” Otten said. “When one of the girls is out, they wait until he’s done and they slide the ice slabs back into the water. It’s most definitely a game they play.”
And thanks to generous butchers and grocery store owners in Livingston, the bears eat well.
“They have lettuce and elk and deer and pronghorn antelope and bison from game processing plants,” Otten said, “All winter they get frozen meat. Brutus’ favorite is a chunk of frozen elk. He just loves his elk sicles.”
As he does every day, Brutus leaves the frozen pond now and climbs the big hill in the enclosure. From there he gazes out at Montana’s Crazy Mountains.
And Otten gazes at the bear that was, when she began raising him, the size of a squirrel.
“Every day,” Otten said, “I remember that if it wasn’t for a place like this, he’d probably be dead.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
