What to do depends on why the bear is attacking you. If the bear is looking for a meal, rolling up in the fetal position is just giving the bear an easy meal. If the bear is angry and wants to show dominance and put you in your place as part of it's response, the fetal position is good, Don't ask me how you tell why the bear is attacking.
LouT -
I have a question for you - how do you tell why the bearing is attacking you ??
John
The fish are always right.
Easy!
Just do what any good city kid would do. Ask him, "Hey, what's your problem man?" 8TOriginally Posted by JohnScott
That's quite, easy, really;
If the bear is wearing a napkin around its neck and carrying utensils, you're dead, no matter what position you take. If he shoves you, first, and calls you nasty names, or makes foul and unpleasant references to your mother.... go for the "fetal/ball position". (but don't sass him back, OR, counter attack with unpleasant and foul things about ITS mother)
Saint Paul-"The Highly Confused"
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Please reread my post. I asked not to ask me that question. "G"
Bear Attack
......http://www.katu.com/news/25639504.html
Doug
Enjoying the joys of others and suffering with them- these are the best guides for man. A.E.
Having spent a significant part of my life around bears... A charter boat on Kodiak Island for the last 15 years to start with... and having hunted them extensively in a lot of very different places... and having been bluff-charged many times... and having had two bears literally die while touching me I think I have a small clue about bears.
First, I think pepper spray is a bad joke. I have seen it used and have zero faith in the stuff. I also have seen it incapacitate the user because they did not realize wind direction is critical. I also watched a guy trying to get his fanny pack off after a half-empty can went off in it. He ran into the river and squatted until he could not stand the cold, then stood till he could not stand the heat... and back and forth for hours. It had run down between his butt cheeks and peeled skin there and beyond...
I frequently photograph the bears, blacks, browns and grizzly. Generally I do not carry a gun when doing so... Nor when fishing on Kodiak streams where we routinely see bears. The point being that when bears show up you leave the areas they want to be in.
But the problem is the idiots that feed bears, either intentionally or inadvertently. When a bear charges a Kodiak deer hunter and the hunter leaves a deer for the bear the bear has become a huge problem and will ultimately have to be shot. It will continue going after the easy meal ticket. Same goes for salmon fishermen.
Alaska has a huge problem currently with bears on a very popular salmon stream, the Russian River. Because they allow the bears to run the program without any adverse training to make them avoid people there have been several maulings and many bears shot in self defense. And it really isn't the bears' fault.
art
hap -
The last time I saw this thread title, I made a mental note to make the point you made so well about wind direction. A couple years ago, at a trailhead in a rather remote place in grizzly country, I decided to test a cannister of bear spray. Just as I fired off a half second blast, the wind shifted and blew it right back into my face, just a very small whiff, actually. That stuff is really NASTY.
The irony may be that if a bear is down wind from you it is much less likely to be a problem. If a bear is upwind from you, it is much more easy to startle it and set up a confrontation. That makes use of bear spray problematic, whether one has faith in it or not.
Thankfully I can't speak directly about the problem that fellow in and out of the stream endured. I will say that anyone carrying a half can of spray is making a major mistake, and that anyone carrying it in a fanny pack or any other pack might as well have left it at camp or at home. If it ain't really handy, it is probably more a problem than a help.
I have to disagree with you that bear spray is a bad joke. While I don't put 100% faith in it and take all the precautions that I can to make it very unlikely that I will ever need it in a bear encounter, I'd rather have it than nothing. So far I haven't had to use it on any critter, which brings up another point. It may not be a bear, but a moose, or lion or feral dog or such that is the problem, not to mention some of the less than pleasant folks one occasionally encounters.
It is sad that so many bears, both in your neck of the woods and down here, are put away because we intrude regularly on their habitat. I don't mean that as judgmental about people and how they use wilderness areas, just as a fact. I'm curious if you would agree from your experience that generally, the more remote the setting you are in, the less likely there will be a problem, given that all the reasonable precautions to avoid an encounter have been taken ??
John
The fish are always right.
John
Outstanding point about the irony of wind direction and probable need and I agree fully.
Thing is though, I have seen spray used on black and brown bears and the problem was not solved with just spray. Also, on one occasion the problem was greatly enhanced by having all that pepper in the air and it limited human options on the retreat. In two cases the bears were ultimately killed because the encounter persisted long after generous applications of pepper.
Friends witnessed a human altercation on a downtown streambank and pepper spray was used to hose down an aggressive human... to no effect whatsoever. The sprayer got pummeled and got plenty of spray on himself. I would never waste valuable space with pepper spray... a handgun, yes, sometimes.
Dogs it works on, but I am a lot less concerned about dogs in the woods I travel.
It only seems wild, but most places along the coast with fishing spots get lots of fishing visitors and bears mix that way. I cannot say which is really the case because all bears I have been around have been close enough to people to see them regularly. But as a point, the vast majority of bear problems IME&O are just like human problems and juvenile males are the big issue.
art
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