Respect The Bear

Werner Herzog discusses Paul Treadwell:

Q: Do you think that his time with the bears gave him a false sense that the borderline was different for him?

A: I do not want to harp on his mistakes, but you are mentioning something startling. Sometimes in the footage that I saw, I felt as if he was the one privileged to step close, as if he was adopting the nature of the bear, huffing like a bear, going on all fours, trying to adopt the nature of the wild beast, like crossing over. One of the ecologists, a friend of Timothy's, speaks about an almost religious experience, to leave your humanness, like in a religious ecstasy, and step into another form, another existence — in Treadwell's case, into the existence of the bear.