The animal grows up in a human household, until its wild energy and instincts make domestic life impossible. The animal stories centered on conflict with industry. In Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar , the eponymous cat wreaks inadvertent havoc in the timber mill where his owner works as a forester. Wahb, the protagonist of King Of The Grizzlies , terrifies the hands on the ranch whose fringes he stalks. King Of The Grizzlies , incidentally, was adapted from a book by Seton.
Resource extraction is shown as an age-old part of nature.
In the spring, saw-logs float down the river as cattle present their hindquarters for branding. The wild animals in these films, centaurs at the wedding, upset the natural order of resource extraction and must therefore be managed, kept in places where they won't interfere with natural industrial cycles. Fragile human society is saved by relegating the devastating wild to its sanctuaries and the wild is happy to be segregated. Disney made this inversion of environmental politics plausible and compelling. In The Gray Flannel Suit and The Incredible Journey , presented us with animals anthropomorphized enough that they might have been played by a human repertory troupe.