"Mens Rea" For A Grizzly Bear?

From Tara:

Slate has a fascinating piece today about a grizzly bear mother who was killed after two attacks on humans in Yellowstone National Park. Click over and take a look, because it's compelling reading. At the core is the policy of destroying bears who are judged to have attacked humans without adequate provocation or explanation:

In the mid-1980s, a group of federal and state wildlife biologists called the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee put out a set of formal guidelines—sort of like a penal code for wild animals.

The rules are quite elaborate but essentially they state: If a grizzly hurts someone while acting in a naturally aggressive way, then the bear goes free. If a grizzly acts unnaturally aggressive, though, and injures a person, it must be euthanized. It all comes down to the animal’s state of mind.

If it could be applied to animals, the legal term here might be the Latin term mens rea, or "guilty mind," something akin to intent to commit the guilty act. And so we must think about the mental state of a bear, doing what bears do (protect their young, hunt for food, defend their territory), as containing a seed of "wrongness" that allows for the subsequent imposition of punishment. It's a fascinating, sad problem. Can a bear tell that humans shouldn't be killed, cached, and eaten? Should caching and partially consuming a human body mitigate or eliminate punishment, as those are normal bear behaviors for other types of food? Can a bear make a "rational" decision to retreat from a threatening situation because to move forward and attack would result in the loss of its life?