Even so, we’ve long posed a much greater threat to bears than they have to us. For centuries, Europeans tormented bears in a practice known as bearbaiting. Bears would be chained to a pole and then attacked by dogs until they were injured or killed, or they’d be placed into a ring with a bull for a fight to the death. England’s royals loved this stuff: Henry VIII had a bear pit made at the Palace of Whitehall.

References to bearbaiting even show up in Shakespeare, when Macbeth laments that his enemies “have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course.” This is an especially interesting passage since by Shakespeare’s time, bears had been extinct in Britain for perhaps a thousand years, likely due to overhunting by humans. To fight the course “bear-like” couldn’t refer to bear behaviors in the natural world, only to the violence bears suffered and meted out in a human-choreographed spectacle.

Although plenty of people recognized bearbaiting as a “rude and dirty pastime,” as the diarist John Evelyn put it, the objections to it weren’t usually about animal cruelty. “The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators,” wrote Thomas Babington Macaulay.

It would be inaccurate, then, to claim our dominion over bears is a wholly recent phenomenon. Still, it’s a bit odd that our children now commonly cuddle with a stuffed version of an animal we used to be afraid to call by name.

Here’s the story of the teddy bear as it is usually told: In November of 1902, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt went bear hunting in Mississippi, which was an extremely Teddy Roosevelt thing to do. The hunting party’s dogs chased a bear for hours before Roosevelt gave up and returned to camp for some lunch.

Roosevelt’s hunting guide that day, a man named Holt Collier, continued to track the bear with his dogs as the president ate lunch. Collier had been born enslaved in Mississippi, and after Emancipation became one of the world’s most accomplished horse riders. (He also killed over three thousand bears in his lifetime.) While Roosevelt was away, Collier’s dogs cornered the bear. Collier blew a bugle to alert the president, but before Roosevelt returned, Collier had to club the bear with a rifle butt because it was mauling one of his dogs.

By the time the president arrived on the scene, the bear was tied to a tree and semiconscious. Roosevelt refused to shoot it, feeling it would be unsportsmanlike. Word of the president’s compassion spread throughout the country, especially after a cartoon in the Washington Post by Clifford Berryman illustrated the event. In the cartoon, the bear is reimagined as an innocent cub with a round face and large eyes looking toward Roosevelt with meek desperation.

Morris and Rose Michtom, Russian immigrants living in Brooklyn, saw that cartoon and were inspired to create a stuffed version of the cartoon cub they called “Teddy’s Bear.” The bear was placed in the window of their candy shop and became an immediate hit. Curiously, a German firm independently produced a similar teddy bear around the same time, and both companies ended up becoming hugely successful. The German manufacturer, Steiff, had been founded a couple decades earlier by Margarete Steiff, and her nephew Richard designed the Steiff teddy bear. By 1907, they were selling nearly a million of them per year. That same year, back in Brooklyn, the Michtoms used their teddy bear sales to found the company Ideal Toys, which went on to manufacture a huge array of popular twentieth-century playthings, from the game Mouse Trap to the Rubik’s Cube.