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It's a bit odd to me that everyone is so confident in their answers (regardless of which answer they choose).
I don't feel like I have a good enough baseline intuition about how dangerous bears are to answer with confidence. How likely is the average bear to attack you? Is it possible to outrun a bear? This is far outside my domain of expertise.
I certainly understand why a lot of women would say "bear", even if they might ultimately be mistaken.
If you found yourself in the same, say, square kilometer as a bear, it is extremely unlikely to attack you. But you are also unlikely to see the bear; it will very much want to avoid you as much as he/she can. If the terrain is open maybe you'll see it at a distance, it's not likely to care unless you get close. But if you do find yourself face-to-face with the bear, the probabilities of attack are very different to the baseline. You might have wandered in proximity to its cubs. The bear might be habituated to human presence, associating them with food. The bear might be starving. These are all bad things.
A human is not gonna outrun a bear. Especially not in uneven terrain and in the forest. You can't climb a tree to evade it. And it has excellent sense of smell so you're unlikely to be able to hide from it.
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A black bear lives by my parents and they’ve only seen it three times in a decade… it seems to ignore them but then again it’s hard to say if it actually saw them since each time they were downwind of the bear.
Anyway one time my dad was fishing in a river near their house and according to him the bear swam across the river much faster than a person could even wade through water much less swim. They’re also fast climbers. It’s impossible to outrun a bear should it decide it wants to hurt you.
That's why we are not calling it by its secret name, Arth, we'd all be attacked before we could finish typing our post on the Mott----
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There’s a saying I’m paraphrasing that I think is basically right,
Black Bear is fine unless you startle a mom with cubs
If a brown bear sees you it’s too late
If you see a polar bear it’s too late
"If it's black, fight back. If it's brown, lie down. If it's white, good night."
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I believe the rhyme goes as follows:
If it's black fight back.
If it's brown stay down.
If it's white, goodnight. (never really liked this one, although to be fair this is the one you are least likely to encounter so I guess the rhyme doesn't matter too much).
In the event of a brown bear, a California ranger told campers to make lots of noise, bang stuff together, yell, and whatnot, the bear would probably think there was a group of people, or more people were coming, and leave. But also that they're really focused on food stashes, so don't be dumb and leave food lying around.
In grizzly or polar bear country, what are people doing out in the wilderness without a group and multiple guns? I think when I was in Alaska the men in town shot any brown bear bold enough to show its face. Each family had a half dozen or so guns.
This Alaskan can confirm. It's why you always take a gun — one with serious stopping power — when salmon fishing (at least, salmon fishing anywhere other than Ship Creek, which runs through Anchorage right by Downtown and the Port).
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Bears are faster than pretty much any human. Rate of attacks is “it depends” on a lot of things.
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Does it specify which species of bear? Black bears are common in the lower 48, and I've run into them before: I've even heard of people aggressively chasing them off. Not cuddly, but some of them aren't that much bigger than a large adult human. Grizzly and polar bears are much larger and dangerous.
I think the distributions of danger here are relevant: a 99th percentile dangerous human might well be much more dangerous than the equivalent black bear, even if the median black bear doesn't even get seen because it avoids humans. The median human is, I would guess, a net help in a survival situation, or at least tries to do so. In my experience, people evaluate risks like that very differently.
Somewhere in here is a decent joke about cougars in the woods: mountain lions are quite dangerous if they decide to kill you, but so are divorces.
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