Murder, Death, and Suicide at the Zoo: Revisiting Anthropomorphic Stories of Quebec’s Captive Polar Bears, 1936–58
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between the 1930s and 1950s, two cohorts of polar bears became star attractions at the Jardin zoologique du Québec, located in Charlesbourg on the outskirts of Quebec City. There, polar bear narratives changed because behaviours and expectations of the zoo’s public changed. But these stories were also shaped by the behaviours of these bears over their lifetimes. By using critical anthropomorphism as a method and drawing on studies of bears in zoos and in the wild, this article suggests that these bears’ moods, emotions, and behaviours were influenced by their individual personalities, the nature of their enclosures, the new stimuli introduced to them, their conditioning to zoo visitors and keepers, and their aging. Stories of the bears, in turn, likely shaped the bears’ human perception. Reproduced in newspaper coverage, much of it carried in wire services, these stories reached very large audiences. The way in which bear behaviours were interpreted, misinterpreted, and anthropomorphized suggests how the animals gained public interest as southern Canadian urban populations oriented themselves toward the Arctic as a “second frontier” in the interwar period, particularly during the Depression years of the 1930s.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".