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Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 14:06:45 -0500
From: Maggie Newman <smnewman@gsbpop.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Honey on baby's cheek

Supporting documentation for the FAQ entry

Fb.Family visits wilderness park. They see bears and want to get "cute pics"

of bear w/child so they smear honey on his cheek. Bear eats child's face.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote an interesting book called The Tribe of Tiger, which is about cats big and small, cat behavior, and animal behavior in general. In it she tells many anecdotes about cats she has known around the world, always backed up with names, dates, and places. But what to my wondering eyes should appear on p. 224 of this book but the UL about "parents smear honey [she said jam] on a baby's cheeks so a bear will lick it off and they can get a nice picture." In the UL the baby is eaten. Her book just says something like "with results you can imagine."

So I wrote to her, in July of 1995, complimenting her on the book and inviting her to immortalize me in the FAQ by revealing the particulars of this incident. Thomas graciously responded a couple of months later from her home in New Hamphire. She revealed a familiarity with ULs and shared that her favorite is "sit, Lady." She went on to admit that the story in her book was hearsay. As best she could recall, she said, she had heard it in a faculty meeting about ten years earlier. She was inclined to believe it because she *had* seen, with her own eyes, parents in a garbage dump near her home town hand their toddler a cupcake to "feed" to a semi-feral stray so they could get a cute picture.

Marshall kindly offered to rewrite or delete this section from a future edition of the book, regretting that it was too late for the paperback edition. I posted this to afu in August or September of 1995 but failed to archive the post, so I recreate the particulars here for the general archive.

Maggie Newman
June 30, 1999