U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region/Flickr

The most contentious issue Maine voters are facing in Tuesday's midterm election isn’t the Affordable Care Act or the Common Core but rather a referendum on bear hunting that seeks to eliminate the use of bait, traps, and dogs.

Attracting millions of dollars in outside money, the issue has been making national headlines and inciting passion from both sides of the debate, so much so that several employees of Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, which opposes the referendum, are under protection due to credible death threats.

What is it about bear hunting that provokes such strong emotions? The history of bear hunting is unusually complex, because the “bear” referred to in bear hunting is actually many species of bears, occupying a range of cultural categories from “predator” to “pet.” From the twelfth century onward, for example, courtiers and kings in Europe refused to hunt brown bears, but it wasn’t because they were too cute to kill: It was because they were ignoble beasts. This is why Molière’s play from 1664, La princesse d’Elide, included a scene where peasants ran after thieving bears while the princess hunted “noble game” (in this case, red deer).

Over time, the negative perception of bears shifted. Several bear species became endangered. Today, the polar bear, the panda, the koala, and the grizzly have become prominent symbols of habitat loss and accelerated rates of extinction. But to Americans, the most iconic bear of all isn’t a species but a stuffed toy, the teddy bear.

Famously, the teddy bear was the unexpected artifact of an actual bear hunt undertaken by president Theodore Roosevelt in the American South. Histories of the beloved toy typically foster a narrative that goes something like this: Chased by dogs, an injured black bear had been tied to a tree. When the president refused to shoot the sad creature, a charmed nation embraced “Teddy’s bear” to acknowledge his compassion for helpless animals.

Yet it wasn’t compassion so much as a hunter’s code that informed Roosevelt’s seemingly noble actions. In 1887, before he became president, Roosevelt founded the Boone & Crockett Club to champion big-game hunting, which he resumed with gusto after he finished his second term in office. Perplexingly, the Boone & Crockett Club is also the country’s oldest wildlife conservation organization, fighting to keep the wilderness wild because it supports hunting.

Still, on the face of it, the idea of naming a toy bear after a big game hunter would seem perverse, were it not for the fact that in 1902, this presidential hunt was taking place under fraught political conditions, elevating an otherwise mundane activity to the level of national discourse.

Roosevelt was touring Mississippi to resolve a border dispute. He decided to take a needed vacation, and accepted a longstanding invitation to hunt with Andrew Longino, the Democrat Governor of Mississippi. It was November and bear hunting season—and also the scene of a vicious fight for the governorship.

Up for reelection, Longino faced Mississippi senator James Vardaman, an ardent white supremacist who would go on to defeat Longino the following year. To Vardaman, African Americans were “lazy, lying, lustful animal[s], which no amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” His solution was lynching.

Against a background of inflammatory rhetoric, the presidential bear hunt embarked with a former slave named Holt Collier leading the way. For Collier to guide the sitting president through the backwoods of Mississippi carried immense symbolic weight. Among other things, it affirmed a particularly American version of the hunt, which challenged the European, aristocratic version by infusing it with a form of meritocratic individualism. Whatever else they may have thought of Collier, historian Douglas Brinkley noted, plantation owners “bragged” that that this former slave, who had served as a Confederate scout during the Civil War, knew the local terrain better than any other man and was an exceptional bear hunter.

The terrain was wide-ranging and dangerous, requiring fifty dogs to scent the quarry and give chase. After days of hard hunting, the pack cornered an adult black bear of 235 pounds. Collier successfully tied it to a tree, then blew the hunter’s bugle to summon the president to his location. When Roosevelt refused to raise his rifle to deliver the fatal shot, the other men in the hunting party killed it, threw it on the back of a horse. They brought it to their base camp, where they undoubtedly ate it for supper, as bear meat was a culinary delicacy.