Stupid is as stupid does. And what he did didn't just *seem* stupid, it was amazingly stupid. And pointless.
He did prove that coastal brown bears will avoid eating people during the salmon runs, but then we already knew that. Sourdough and native wisdom up here has always held that coastal brown bears are most dangerous right after exiting the den and right before going in. Until that last fateful trip, Timmy boy timed his travels so he wouldn't have to spend any cold nights up here. He came in well after breakup and left well before the termination dust. The rest of the time he did the talk show circuit and hung out in Malibu.
From all I've seen, the bears did NOT think of Treadwell as "another bear," though this was what he said he wanted. Coastal brown bear are not pack animals. They congregate around salmon streams in a kind of truce in order to share in the proceeds, but they don't like it. Bear instinctively want to be solitary except for VERY brief mating encounters. Treadwell's constant references to "alpha" females and males revealed the depth of his ignorance. There are no alphas or omegas in the bear world. There's only the one who's strongest that day and has the best salmon catching spot that day. They do not think, hunt, or act in packs. The closest you get to a bear "family" is a sow with cubs, but that's nowhere near as complex as a wolf pack or primate group.
The bear recognized him as a harmless thing, and that's as far as their reasoning went on the matter. They got used to seeing him jumping around, and learned to tolerate him and the smell of man. But their attention was on getting salmon. The first time Treadwell lingered after the run had ended, he was promptly killed and eaten. Any fear of man that would have caused that boar to hesitate before striking or to run from the smell of his own kill had long since been erased by Treadwell's own idiotic efforts to tame these animals.
