No filmmakers ever showed up to glorify bear worshipper Donna Munson in the years before her horrible, bloody August death. Lacking the Hollywood connections of her Alaska counterparts -- Charlie Vandergaw and Timothy Treadwell -- she was easily dismissed by many as just some crazy Colorado woman who fed and mothered bears for at least a decade until one killed and ate her.

"At 74," the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported last month, "Donna Munson showed signs of dementia, suffered from congestive heart failure and shuffled around her 40-acre property near Ouray using a walker."

Given the freakish and morbid circumstances surrounding her death, this was all that was needed for her biography in the popular press for the few days her story was around as news. If you bothered to dig a little deeper, though, it was possible to find more: Mother of five, trained nurse, faithful churchgoer, Humane Society booster, and by all indications a friend to many, both four-legged and two.

"Sweet old lady" might seem a more accurate description than "confused whack job."

"You had to know her,'' Jennifer Brown told the Denver Post. "She was a very loving woman. So much into animals."

I never knew Munson, but I've known more than a few like her in more than 30 years in Alaska, and most weren't suffering any signs of dementia.

They just had some strange urge to make pets of bears or foxes or other wild animals in the way people reading this are friends with dogs or cats. Legendary Lake Clark National Park mountain man Dick Proenneke, for crying out loud, tried to befriend a wolverine, and no one called him nuts. The park service even made something of a monument of his cabin at Twin Lakes after his death.

The people who manage wildlife, understandably, don't like all of these attempts to walk with the animals, talk with the animals and, most dangerously, get all cuddly with the animals.

After a black bear bigger than a North Slope grizzly dragged Munson out of the fenced-in bear-feeding cage at her home in the mountains down the road from Grand Junction, wildlife authorities there issued the standard warning that people shouldn't feed the bears and lamented how they'd been trying for years to get Munson to stop putting out dog food for the bruins, but just couldn't catch her in the act of feeding the animals.

Some of it sounded awfully familiar. Much the same was said in Alaska about 70-year-old Charlie Vandergaw.

Until this spring, when Vandergaw's high profile as a "bear whisperer" finally embarrassed the Alaska State Troopers and the Alaska Department of Law into action, the retired Anchorage science teacher had spent 20 summers feeding tons of dog food to bears at his homestead in the Yentna River Valley north of Alexander Creek with law enforcement authorities unwilling to do much about it.

They complained that the state law against feeding bears was just too hard to enforce. It probably didn't hurt that old Vandergaw had at least one retired employee of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game sometimes hanging out at "Bear Haven," as Vandergaw called his place, along with some other Alaskans with political connections.

In defense of Vandergaw, too, and of the state, it must be noted that he wasn't and isn't demented. Not even close.

Vandergaw knows bears as well as anyone I've ever met, and over the course of a lot of years of writing about wildlife and the environment in Alaska, I've met plenty of people who know bears or have known bears in all sorts of ways. Dozens of these were people mauled by bears. Tens of them were scientists who spent their lives observing, tracking and handling hundreds, if not thousands, of bears.