One fine spring day several years ago, I was waiting for friends in the lounge of a large hotel in Banff National Park. I was using my binoculars to watch a black bear sow and her new cub, who had just walked out of the treeline and were tentatively exploring the far edge of the meadow, about 180 metres away.

I overheard an American couple with Georgia-ish accents trying to get their kids to hurry up and get their coats on, because they wanted to run out and take pics of them with the “cute little bear” before it and mama disappeared back into the conifers.

It took a lot of sharp talk for me to get across to them that this was an extremely ill-advised idea, that these bears were completely wild creatures, and that approaching a nervous sow with a tiny and vulnerable spring cub was basically inviting her to put you in hospital for a week or two, and perhaps even to kill your child if you stupidly ordered them to approach the cub.

Innocents that they were, they didn’t really believe that such a high-end hotel would permit dangerous animals to trespass on their property, or that it hadn’t just set out a menagerie of docile Rocky Mountain mega-fauna to wander the grounds for their guests’ amusement, like some gigantic petting zoo; in fact, they actually got quite huffy about it and began to argue, until I waylaid a passing concierge to help explain the facts of Canadian park life to them.

They obviously felt we both were deliberately being gigantic Canuck buzzkills who were out to spoil their day, because they walked away without even saying thank you.