A run-in with human snacks transformed Kobuk the Destroyer’s mother into a “problem bear.” A native of the Alaskan wilderness, the grizzly was possibly ruined by a dumpster or a cache of campsite refuse, teaching her that food was simply there for the taking—a rewarding hack for the perennial dinnertime problem. This never ends well, and it was only a matter of time before her taste for free-range chickens got her killed by a rancher. If she was the problem, the two cubs she left behind were recruited to help with the solution.
The bear-resistant container was invented to arrest the inadvertent cultivation of problem bears. A new cooler or compost bin cannot be marketed as bear-resistant until bears have been given a fair chance to break into it and fail. The gold standard is set by a consortium called the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, or I.G.B.C. Its original certification program was mechanical. Testers dropped heavy weights from considerable heights onto the containers and used metal fangs to make stabs at perforation. These things, needless to say, lacked the wits of the animals they were meant to represent. The cubs, Kobuk in particular, found their calling at a West Yellowstone sanctuary where the I.G.B.C. enlisted the bears as product testers. Human employees would fill new containers with fish, peanut butter, honey, and dog biscuits, snap the locks shut, and deliver them to their ursine colleagues for compliance testing. Candidates pass by withstanding precisely sixty minutes of no-holds-barred “bear contact time” without sustaining holes larger than a quarter of an inch.
The pioneering roboticist Rodney Brooks once commented that “the world is its own best model.” No bear surrogate, in other words, is as good as an actual bear. Kobuk justified his tenure on the federal payroll and earned the nickname “the Destroyer” not because he was savage (although he was) but because he was canny. He handily manipulated latches designed to defeat paws. The I.G.B.C. justifies its own tenure on the federal payroll because the definition of “bear-resistant” cannot be left to bears. We need people to decide that a product has failed if it can be opened in the buzzer-beating fifty-ninth minute of a bear attack. | 
