Letters from Our Readers

Bear With Us

Paige Williams’s piece about bears in Lake Tahoe repeatedly refers to “euthanizing” bears (“Wild Side,” December 2nd). I saw the same euphemism used in my small town, in Washington State, a couple of summers ago, when bears encroached too much on the human side of the human-wildlife interface. (One went through our neighbor’s house.) Let’s call this act what it is: we’re killing them. What’s happening isn’t euthanasia, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (such as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy.” I hope that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is using painless methods, but its actions do not reflect “mercy.” These killings are carried out for the convenience of humans. The more honest we can be about this, the more incentive we’ll have to try to reduce the temptations for bears to come into “our” space, as the BEAR League teaches.

Elizabeth Wise
Cle Elum, Wash.

I worked in Yellowstone National Park for three summers in the early eighties. The moment I started, I was taught to use the term “touron,” which Williams also learned while reporting her piece, to describe the park’s visitors. A co-worker of mine even won the employee talent show by singing “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Tourons,” in a take on a song made famous by Willie Nelson. People treating natural landscapes like Disneylands is not new.

Loralee DiLorenzo
Marine on St. Croix, Minn.

Feeling It Out

Alice Gregory’s article on the philosopher L. A. Paul and her circle of oddly amusing philosophers was itself amusing and instructive (“Note to Selves,” December 9th). A great deal of what passes for the pursuit of wisdom in academia these days is, indeed, esoteric, technical, and, finally, irrelevant. But it should be noted that Professor Paul is hardly a pioneer in asserting, however “hesitantly,” that “experience has a kind of value” and that philosophy ought to be less “detached from ordinary life.” William James and the pragmatists said it long ago. In 1900, James, immersed in preparing lectures that would become “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” described the “problem” he set himself as “to defend (against all the prejudices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life.”

Phil Oliver
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Middle Tennessee State University
Nashville, Tenn.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do?

Jennifer Wilson’s article on bad breakup cures was informative and entertaining (“Hello, Heartbreak,” December 9th). But she left out some of the best advice from social-science research: start dating again. Evidence from a study published in the Journal of Social & Personal Relationships found that those who started a new relationship sooner felt more desirable and had higher levels of well-being, trust, and self-esteem. Meanwhile, research from the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage involving hundreds of divorced women who subsequently remarried showed that—contrary to what those who counsel a cooling period might think—the length of the interval between the end of one marriage and the beginning of another had no relationship to the duration of the second marriage.

Milt Mankoff
New York City

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