Absurdity
America Outsourced Its Wildlife Management To A Bear Obesity Tournament
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
KING SALMON, AK. Every September, the National Park Service, an agency that manages 85 million acres of American wilderness and has a maintenance backlog estimated at somewhere between 22 and infinity billion dollars, pauses to ask the public one urgent question: which bear is the fattest?
Fat Bear Week, now in its tenth year, is a single-elimination bracket tournament hosted by Katmai National Park in which voters pick the most impressively enlarged brown bear from a field of eight contestants. The winner receives no prize. The bears do not know they are competing. The Park Service describes the event as "a celebration of bear health and hyperphagia."
Hyperphagia is the clinical term for the period when bears eat twenty thousand calories a day to prepare for winter. The Park Service found a Greek word for it because "eating until your legs disappear" did not test well with focus groups.
This year's bracket features Bear 747, a returning champion and former title holder so large that rangers have taken to naming him after a commercial aircraft, which raises questions about what the classification system looks like at the top. Also in the field: Bear 901, a female described in park materials as having achieved "remarkable symmetrical bulk," and Bear 32 Chunk, whose name was apparently chosen by a ranger who had given up on subtlety entirely.
"We want people to feel connected to wildlife," said park ranger Dana Strahl, who manages the Fat Bear Week social media accounts in addition to her actual job. "When someone votes for their favorite bear, they're investing in the ecosystem." She paused. "Also Bear 747 is just enormous. Like, genuinely, we don't fully understand it."
Approximately four million people voted in last year's tournament, which is more participation than most school board elections and several actual Senate races. The bears, for their part, were eating salmon in a river and had no comment.
The bracket runs for one week, proceeds through four rounds, and is governed by rules that include a provision against voting bots, a term of service agreement, and a formal protest process that has been used twice: once by a voter who believed the photograph of Bear 480 was taken at a flattering angle, and once by a man in Ohio who submitted a seventeen-page document arguing the seeding methodology was structurally biased against boars.
The Park Service reviewed the complaint and determined the seeding methodology was fine.
Meanwhile, the agency's maintenance backlog, which covers collapsing bridges, failing water systems, and roads described in internal assessments as "a continuing hazard," has been sitting in a queue since the Clinton administration. There is no bracket for that. There is no voting mechanism, no social media countdown, no ranger named Dana running its Instagram.
There is a form. The form leads to a committee. The committee produces a report. The report enters a funding process that Congress has failed to complete on time in twenty-six of the last thirty years.
Bear 747 will have a winner by Friday.
The bridge in Denali is still thinking about it.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bright-side-a-convicted-fraudster-a-fat-bear-and-a-very-happy-accident