About

Patient Bear is the nickname given to a black bear seated at a wooden table appearing as if it is waiting for someone. Originally sighted and photographed by an Ontario, Canada resident in 2008, the two photographs of the bear have been since adopted into demotivational posters and reaction images that are often used in comments and replies to convey a sense of growing impatience in a similar manner to Waiting For Op images.

Origin

On May 11th, 2008, Ontario, Canada resident Dorothys Hays took two photographs and a video of a black bear trespassing on her property in Kakeda Falls (shown below). On December 2nd, 2009, the Get Bear Smart YouTube channel uploaded Hays' video in which the bear is shown seated at a wooden table in her backyard.

On August 15th, 2008, the Demotivational Posters website Motifake^[1] highlighted an image of the bear with the caption "Picnics. This bear likes them" (shown below).

Spread

Throughout the rest of 2008, photographs of the bear circulated via nature-themed blogs like Treehugger^[2] and Internet humor sites like My Confined Space^[3] and Thread Bombing.^[4] In November, the bear was posted in a 4chan thread on the /tg/^[7] (traditional games) board in reference to the Druid class in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft. That month, a demotivational referring to the bear as "Patient Bear" was submitted to the Internet humor site HumorHound^[9] (shown below, left). On June 29th, 2011, another "Patient Bear" demotivational was posted in a Shroomery Forums^[10] thread by member Muufokfok (shown below, right).

On January 1st, 2012, an Advice Animal creation page for Patient Bear^[8] was launched on Meme Generator. As of February 2015, the page is ranked #4,062 on the site and has generated over 1,400 submissions.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References