The woman who left me a phone message about a week ago had a problem. A young black bear appeared to have been orphaned in her neighborhood and couldn’t seem to fend for itself.

She wondered if there were someplace she could take it. Possibly someone had a mother bear that would accept the cub and raise it, she said, and did I know of such a person or place?

Well, no. I didn’t happen to know anyone with a sow black bear that was looking to adopt.

Wildlife officials with the Department of Natural Resources in Minnesota and Wisconsin must get even more calls like that than I do. Spring is the big season, of course. Wild critters are dropping offspring.

Occasionally, one is orphaned when something happens to its mother. And often people befriend baby birds or fawns or bears that don’t really need any help. They haven’t been abandoned, though they may appear to have been.

I called back to talk to the woman who had left me a message, and we had a nice talk. She said she had felt sorry for the bear cub, which she estimated weighed about 15 pounds. Just a little squirt. She had been feeding it for several days. The cub apparently had gotten quite accustomed to showing up for its handouts.

I told the woman how I felt about most situations involving the feeding or rescue of animals. In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea, though I’ll admit that it’s awfully hard not to help a cuddly little bear cub.

Most of the time, if a critter is in trouble, it’s because of some sort of human interaction – often involving a moving vehicle. That leaves a young animal to fend for itself, and those situations often end badly.

Either the animal becomes a menace, requiring a conservation officer to kill and remove it, or the young animal meets its own demise because it doesn’t have a parent to care for it.

A person I know rescued a fawn this spring from the carnage of a doe that had been hit by a truck. Miraculously, one of the two fawns the doe had been carrying was alive. Despite the rescuer’s best efforts, the fawn died within two days at the home of an animal rehabilitator.

I might have stopped to rescue that fawn, too, had I been the one driving by, but its odds for survival already were poor.

Despite our best efforts as humans, wild animals are meant to be in the wild. Our intrusions into that world, while well-intentioned, are most often not doing the wild population any favors.

If that bear cub the woman is feeding does survive, it may someday be a nuisance because it is so habituated to humans, so accustomed to getting its meals on a platter. The woman who had been feeding it said she knew that wasn’t a good thing in the long run.

It’s difficult to accept that the death of a wild animal we’ve encountered is part of a bigger picture, that its dying is part of the survival-of-the-fittest plan.

Wild things survive and die in the woods every day without us. Northern pike swirl to the surface and eat baby ducks. Wolves take down deer. Black bears prey on moose calves and whitetail fawns.

It isn’t pretty. But the system works.

It’s only when the bear cub shows up foraging for food on our deck that things get complicated.