>Poacher could face jail time after bear found dead at Colorado RV park, officials say
>https://twitter.com/MiamiHerald/status/1540067449592320000
isn't Russia know as the"BEAR'?
https://www.rbth.com/history/330484-russian-bear-became-symbol
How the bear became the symbol of Russia
JUNE 10 2019
The Russian bear became a symbol of Russia through a strange set of circumstances, and the whole story goes to show that fake news has been around for hundreds of years.
To begin with, the bear is not a symbol of Russia and has never been one, at least officially. The official symbol of Russia today is a double-headed eagle (the one depicted on the Russian national emblem). But imagine that for at least five centuries someone outside Russia has been persistently trying to persuade you otherwise. At some point, the number of people all over the world who believed in this idea exceeded the critical threshold, and eventually Russians just kind of got tired of trying to resist it. At some point it just became easier to accept this misunderstanding than trying to constantly explain why it isn’t true.
And so here we are: launching a huge inflatable bear into the sky at the closing ceremony of the 1980 Olympics and making the bear a symbol of the largest celebration in the country. But let's start from the beginning.
Bear executions and widespread hearsay
What is true in this whole bear story is the fact that bears have indeed been venerated in Russia since ancient times. For pagan Slavs, the bear was in effect a totem animal.
It is also known that for several centuries in the Middle Ages, troupes travelled all around Russia with tame bears that were trained to dance, do simple tricks and beg.
One of bears' main “vocations” at that time was performing executions. This had been practiced for a long time, but it was under Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century that bear executions went mainstream. Sometimes bears were used indirectly in the execution process: a convict would be sewn up into a bear skin and then dogs would be set on him, tearing apart the bear skin along with the unlucky guy inside.
And yet, it wasn’t these horror stories that spread around the world so easily. In 1526, an Austrian diplomat named Siegmund von Herberstein wrote the following about the winter in Russia: "Bears, driven by hunger, left the woods, ran around neighboring villages and broke into houses; at the sight of them, villagers fled their houses and died of cold, a pitiful death." This account was then copied by numerous Italian, Polish, British, German and Dutch travelers to Russia over the next hundred years, and in the process the notion that bears roam Russian streets started to be considered something normal and regular. This is how one of the most enduring myths about Russia was born, and ever since there has been this strange assumption around the world that there are bears walking the streets everywhere.
A remedy for baldness
None of this was some kind of a European conspiracy or anything like that. These days, most likely, everything would start with a viral meme on social media, but back then the original source was advertising by shrewd English merchants. From the mid-16th century, these merchants regularly visited Russia. Meanwhile, ordinary British people's idea of Russia was shaped by the exports coming from there: honey, furs, wool, fat, wax, and what inhabitants of good old England believed to be bear’s grease. In other words, bear’s grease did to the image of Russia what croissants did to the image of Paris.
Merchants promoted Russian bear grease as the best remedy for hair loss. On what grounds? Well, on the grounds that bears are very hairy. The fact that grease came from far away in Russia explained the exorbitant price.