Reasonable Doubt
What Is a Bear?
A private zoo owner thought he was taking good care of his bear. Activists say he was torturing her. The epic fight that ensued cuts to the heart of society’s reappraisal of the inner lives of animals.
In the fall of 2016, Bradley Gerwig’s phone began to ring and ring. Morning, noon, and night, callers from around the world bombarded the 77-year-old’s landline at his modest ranch home in Keymar, Maryland, a blip of rolling farmland an hour northwest of Baltimore. Most callers were polite but firm as they implored Gerwig to turn over custody of Lily, an Asiatic black bear with floppy ears and sleepy eyes that Gerwig had reared in his backyard zoo since she was a cub. Lily was now approximately 10 years old and, by all measures, a giant.
The flood of calls was prompted by PETA, which first got wind of Lily when a visitor to Gerwig’s zoo reached out to the animal rights group to report an obese bear that seemed like it was having a hard time breathing. The tipster passed along photos of Lily sitting in the circular wire cage where she’d spent just about every day of her life. It looked bare-bones and filthy: A car tire hung from a rope in the center, globs of scat dotted the ground, and a metal pipe served as…
