Animals are one of the most prolific sources for the creation of idioms. Aside from the domain of the human body, idioms originating from the domain of animals are one of the most frequent. Since human behavior seems to be metaphorically understood in terms of animal behavior (Kövecses 2010: 124), different properties of animals are often used to vividly display certain events or the behavior, feelings, states, and appearance of people. Throughout history, animals were exploited not only as sources for food or clothing, but their characteristics, whether having to do with visual or physical aspects, behavioral patterns, have been anthropomorphized - used as reference to depict human physical and moral traits. The origin of animal idioms can therefore be traced back to observation-based behavioral and physical properties of different animal species. These observation-based properties are, however, not unique in every culture. Mental concepts related to various animals, their cultural constructs, vary from culture to culture. The way in which animals are socially constructed influences how they are treated by human society, making these cultural constructs intimately bound up with language and discourse (Sibbe 2001: 147). The aim of this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of English and German animal idioms, more precisely, idioms in which the animal bear acts as the core of the idiom. By using text corpora for both languages an analysis of bear idioms will be carried out and consequently, on the basis of the corpora results, it will be discussed what similarities and differences in terms of idiom motivation the two languages share, i.e. what it is that distinguishes the cultural concepts of the English and German speaking countries regarding the images of bears.