Mark Dumas and Agee: The Man Who Swam with a Polar Bear in Abbotsford

For more than two decades, animal trainer Mark Dumas of Abbotsford, British Columbia, shared his mornings, his swimming pool and his lawn with Agee, a female polar bear he and his wife Dawn raised from a tiny cub. Footage of the pair swimming nose to nose made Agee famous far beyond the film sets where she worked, and earned Dumas the nickname "Grizzly Man" in the viral video that introduced them to millions.

Agee: a polar bear born in Sweden, raised in British Columbia

Agee was born on 3 January 1995 at Kolmården Wildlife Park in Sweden. At about two months old she was flown to Canada, where Mark Dumas had acquired her for a film role. She was bottle-fed and lived in the Dumas home at first, then moved to her own pen and pool on the family's four-hectare property in Abbotsford, in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, as she grew to nearly 800 pounds (about 360 kg).

The Dumases' company, Beyond Bears, trained her through positive reinforcement. She was widely described as the only trained polar bear in North America.

Agee's film career: from Alaska to Arctic

Agee's first role came while she was still a young cub, in Alaska (1996), the family adventure film starring Charlton Heston. Over the following years she worked on commercials, including a Nissan advertisement in which she walked through city streets, and on feature films such as:

• Alaska (1996)
• Operation Arctic (2014), a Norwegian children's drama
• The Journey Home (2014)
• Arctic (2019), the survival drama directed by Joe Penna and starring Mads Mikkelsen

In an age of computer-generated animals, directors valued a real bear that could take direction. On set she worked inside a thin electric-wire enclosure.

Swimming with a polar bear every morning

The scenes that made the pair famous were filmed at home. Dumas swam with Agee in her pool most mornings, napped against her on the grass and let her mouth his neck in play. He said he did not worry about her hurting him, yet he never pretended she was tame: he called her "still a wild animal," left her alone when she was cranky and waited for her to nap and come back in a good mood. Her diet was famously varied, from chicken and salmon to the occasional pizza or Thai takeaway.

Polar bears are the largest land carnivores on Earth, and Agee's calm with Dumas came from a lifetime with one family. Watch them from a distance in the wild: bears are seen from tundra vehicles around Churchill, Manitoba, and only with armed guides in Svalbard.

Agee's final years at Assiniboine Park Zoo

In 2022 Agee moved to Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg, home of the Journey to Churchill polar bear exhibit. She lived there in a private area away from public view, with care suited to an elderly bear. By 2025 she was suffering from kidney failure, dental problems and reduced mobility, and she died in June 2025 at the age of 30, a very old age for a polar bear.

Video: Mark Dumas and Agee

Video: The Only Man In The World Who Can Swim With A Polar Bear: Grizzly Man (published by Truly).

Explore more: Doug Seus’s work with trained bears; a different polar-bear encounter involving dogs.

Related reading

• A Young Squirrel Brought Indoors: The Rescue Photo Sequence
• The BBC’s Snowball Cam Meets Svalbard Polar Bears
• Helsinki Zoo’s Brown Bears Return to the Snow
• A Siberian Husky Disappears into an Autumn Leaf Pile
• Japanese Snow Monkeys Bathing in Hot Springs

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