Fat Bear Week 2024 Was Basically ‘The Lion King’

If you’re somehow not familiar with America’s second-most important voting event, Alaska’s Katmai National Park & Preserve invites the internet to view their ursine residents through inconspicuously mounted cameras as they fatten up for the winter and vote on the shapeliest one every October. It’s ostensibly in service of raising awareness of wildlife preservation, but nobody cares about that — they just want to see the fat bears. It doesn’t seem like the kind of event that would produce Shakespearean drama and tragedy, but recent competitions have proven that even the Fat Bears know betrayal.

It all started in 2023, when a bear named 128 Grazer won in a landslide. It was undeniably her year — after raising two litters of cubs, she was finally free of childcare duties, in the best shape of her life and giving serious divorced mom energy. As one ranger put it, “She has been putting in the work. She was quite dainty in early summer, but now she is huge.” Her dedication to bodily perfection earned her a whopping 108,321 votes, more than four times the number of votes earned by the runner-up, 32 Chunk.

Well, it seems Chunk simply couldn’t allow a good woman to thrive. Grazer soon gave birth to another litter — hey, a hot ticket item like that isn’t going to stay off the market for long — and in July 2024, two of them fell into a waterfall. The turbulent rapids happened to carry them straight to wear Chunk was hanging out, and he apparently saw the perfect opportunity to get his revenge and throw his opponent off-kilter enough to claim his crown. Or he just did what male bears tend to do when confronted with cubs that aren’t theirs. That is, he attacked them, fatally wounding one.

Lesser bears might have let such a loss and offense wear them down, but Grazer? Not a chance. She trained and trained, by which we mean she loafed around and ate just an absolute grip of salmon. She was living her own personal woodland Kill Bill, and just like the Bride, there was no way she wasn’t going to emerge victorious. Sure enough, when the votes rolled in for 2024’s Fat Bear Week, Grazer dominated once again, scoring around 70,000 votes to Chunk’s 30,000. 

Is this the end of their feud, or just the beginning of a blockbuster cat and mouse (bear and bear?) franchise? We’ll just have to tune in next year.