The Bear Whisperer

Doug Seus made his name by mastering a near-impossible and perilous feat: training grizzly bears for Hollywood films. Then he came up with a radical, equally ambitious plan to protect the species that he holds dear.

- By Rick Bass

GRIZZLIES HAVE BEEN extinct in Utah for nearly a century, but there’s a giant one in Doug Seus’ backyard. When the bear sees Doug, it hurries through an open chain-link gate—and charges. A magpie swoops out of the way. The 1,250-pound bear closes in, stops, and rises to its nine-foot height. At age 78, Doug is still burly, but the bear, now just yards away, could easily knock him off his feet and ragdoll him around. Instead, the giant wraps its arms around Doug, delighted. The grizzly wants to play.

Seus, an animal trainer and a grizzly advocate, steps toward the bear, named Little Bart, and meets his embrace. Little Bart leans in, and they begin to waltz. Dressed in jeans and a red flannel shirt, Doug almost disappears next to the animal. When Little Bart wraps his jaws around Doug’s head, Doug pushes back. “Ahhh,” he says. “No.” Little Bart is getting carried away; Doug smacks his huge shoulders. Little Bart pulls back, releases Doug, and then swats him on the shoulder with a paw, as if to say, You know I was only funnin’.

There’s a good chance that if you’ve seen a wild animal in a movie or on television sometime in the past 40 years, Doug and Lynne Seus trained it in this backyard, outside Heber City, Utah. The couple has taught wolves to howl, raccoons to run up trees, and cougars to yowl on command. Their specialty, though, is the grizzly. They’ve trained four adults, an improbable feat: Bart, Little Bart (or Bart II), Honey Bump, and Tank. The movies The Edge, Evan Almighty, Into the Wild, and Legends of the Fall featured a Seus bear. In Season 3 of