It was a story that captured the imaginations of millions of people around the world.
Earlier this week, a two and a half minute video of a baby bear scaling a snowy mountainside went viral.
In the clip, which was shared millions of times online, the tiny bear is rushing up the snowy cliff behind its mother.
While the mother easily reaches the top, the baby bear struggles to make it. As the mother anxiously paces on the top of the cliff, the cub climbs its little heart out almost reaching her, before slipping down the cliff, time and time again.
At the end of the video, the cub finally and triumphantly reaches the top, and the mother and baby are reunited. Then they quickly walk out of shot.
While at first the video seemed like a cute little reminder about the power of perseverance, there’s a dark side to it.
You see, it was most likely a drone that captured the video and it was the fear of that drone that sent the bear and its cub into a dangerous situation that almost cost the cub its life.
As The Atlantic reports, biologists were immediately disturbed by what they saw in the video.
They said the mother probably wouldn’t have taken the risk of climbing such a treacherous cliff with her cub, if she didn’t see the drone as an immediate threat.
“I found it really hard to watch,” Sophie Gilbert, an ecologist at the University of Idaho, told The Atlantic. “It showed a pretty stark lack of understanding from the drone operator of the effects that his actions were having on the bears.”
While the short clip inspired thousands of inspirational memes, it’s actually a cautionary tale about drones and the animal world.
And at the root of the story is a terrified mother trying desperately to protect her cub from a predator she’ll never truly understand.