My first pets were two hamsters, sisters from the same litter. I was surprised that such tiny little brains could harbor such different personalities: Harley, golden and white, was more athletic, more aloof, noticeably smarter, and liked to play alone; Yankee, a chubby, cream-colored meatball, longed for human touch – she ran to the door at the top of her cage and stared upward, unable to see much with the terrible eyesight of a hamster, but certain that I would soon come for her to cancel. She just wanted to be held and petted. She was the biggest little cutie on God’s green earth. The sisters got along splendidly in their shared three-story cage. And then one day, out of nowhere, and for reasons I never understood and they probably didn’t understand either, Yankee started beating Harley up every time they crossed paths – biting her, scratching her, and screaming in rage mere sight of her previously beloved sister. We separated them, gave them each their own cage, and each of them spent their long, happy hamster lives in solitary confinement. But it was a good lesson for my younger self. No matter how fluffy or friend they look, creatures are not just furry people and cannot be viewed or treated as such. Animals are animals.

Grizzly bears are ancient predators, although they look a lot like thousand-pound hamsters. They are mysterious, unknowable and capable of enormous feats of strength and violence. Our ancestors knew this: the word “bear” was originally a euphemism that our Germanic-speaking ancestors invented because they were afraid to use the animal’s true name and which they made taboo out of superstitious fear of meeting it when they said it. Our Enlightenment-era scientists were no less intimidated – it was referred to Ursus arctos horribilis for a reason. This week in Alaska, nature provided a morbid and useful reminder that bears are bears, with all that entails.

The start of Fat Bear Week, the charming and popular fan-voted competition to crown the grizzly bear that gains the most weight before hibernation, was delayed because one of the bear competitors murdered another bear.

I shouldn’t use the word “murdered.” It carries an intention and humanizes something that stubbornly resists it. And what’s more, experts still don’t understand what led to Bear 469, nicknamed “Digger” by fans, killing Bear 402 in a fight in the Brooks River in Katmai National Park on Monday morning:

As stunned viewers watched online, the two bears engaged in a long and violent battle in the deep water at the river’s mouth – a clash that ultimately ended with one bear dying and the other dragging her body to shore.

“Very difficult to see. I mean, 402 is a beloved bear to every single one of us,” Mike Fitz, the resident naturalist for the webcam company Explore.org, said in a video in which he and two Katmai Park experts discussed the incident.

“Honestly, I think we’re all a little speechless,” Fitz said.

It was not a territorial conflict – that is common and recognizable. Instead, it appeared to be a predator-prey interaction, said Sarah Bruce, a park ranger, with 469 charging at the only slightly smaller 402 as if it were a target. After drowning 402 in the river, 469 dragged her body into the forest and guarded it like a food supply. (“Nature, red in tooth and claw,” also played out there: the huge, fan-favorite bear 32, nicknamed “Chunk,” chased away 469 and stole the carcass of 402.)

Fat Bear Week organizers postponed the start of the tournament a day after the incident and instead turned it into a teachable moment by showing the murder in its entirety and letting experts discuss it. Note: The video is not graphic – most interactions take place in deep water – but depending on your tolerance it may be potentially disturbing.

“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” said the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, meaning that an animal’s inner life and lived experience are so radically different from our own that we would have no context in which to understand his words and thoughts would make sense to us. Who can know what it’s like to be a bear (or, famously, a bat or a beluga)? Who can imagine the primal pain of hyperphagia, the constant, overwhelming hunger that grips a grizzly and drives it to eat everything within reach before winter comes? Who can imagine the red-veiled vision through which Bear 469, a perfectly conceived and motivated killer, saw the world before 402 came into his sight?

This may not have been 469’s first rodeo. Fat Bear Week’s fan base is dedicated and thorough, following this individual bear’s appearance since 2001. They are helpfully collected in a Fat Bear Wiki, which notes that Bear 469 was seen near the remains of an unidentified bear in 2012. The next year he was seen with a serious injury, possibly sustained in a fight with another bear. That doesn’t make him “mean” or “evil,” any more than the late and amazing bear 402’s status as mother of at least eight litters made her virtuous or loving. Some adjectives intended for humans simply cannot apply to bears. In the cold eyes of nature, the death of 402 is no more a tragedy than each individual death of a thousand salmon – it is simply a fact.

Fat Bear Week is a joy. These bears are getting so fat! But it would be a mistake to think of them as just charming Chungus, and not just for the unfortunate event that you meet one. Appreciating an animal, especially an apex predator in the wild, means appreciating all of its behaviors, from the cuddly to the bloody. Bears will be bears whether we like them or not.