I was sorely tempted to change this to Inuit (pronounced Eye-knew-it) — my polar bear character, who is likely to be more fun to talk about than integrity.  But integrity is more important than my fictional character.  The layman’s definition of integrity is “doing the right thing even when nobody is watching or will know.”

Inuit struggles with an integrity question when she eats a California sea lion.  In the polar bear world, there’s no integrity question.  Bears eat sea lions (or, preferably, seals).  It’s normal, natural, and completely in line with nature’s intention, so, when Inuit was swimming off the beaches of Los Angeles, it seemed perfectly normal to her to eat a sea lion she snuck up behind while it was sunning on the rocks — until she remembered that people don’t do that.  People, ahem, do not eat sea lions, and if they wander out to the rocks where sea lions hang out and kill one, someone will be asking questions.  Inuit is trying to live in a human world. What does a bear with integrity do?

Do she ignore the situation and hope nobody will notice?  Does she come forward and own up to what happened?  Did she do anything wrong? Could her actions or in-actions take an acceptable situation and create an unacceptable one by how she chooses to handle the situation?  Fitting into human culture isn’t as easy as it looks.