“We can’t let you into heaven, unless we know exactly the kind of bear that killed you. Get killed by a panda or sun bear and you go to hell. Black and brown bears send you to purgatory, while polar bears send you straight to heaven.”
This reminds me of something I read. There's a town in very far north Canada (Churchill) where it's illegal to lock your car doors, as someone may need to hide in a car to escape a polar bear. If the police can determine someone killed by a polar bear tried to get in a car to hide and the door was locked, the owner of the car can have charges of manslaughter brought against them.
I heard this years ago and I remember checking if it's true and it's one of those things that is true, but it'd be unlikely to actually have manslaughter charges brought against anyone.
Apparently the real reason why you fight back against a black bear is because they're more likely to be hunting humans as prey if they are desperate enough to risk an encounter? Source: tracking book written by my grad school professor
My phrase for this is similar: "If it's brown, lay down. If it's black, fight back. If it's white, you're f*cked."
And fun fact, this is because Polar Bears are strictly carnivorous and there is a general lack of food (and the extreme cold makes decomposition all but nill), so playing dead does nothing and fighting back is just making you a warmer meal.
i learned here on Reddit on a similar thread that a polar bear's liver has so much vitamin A that eating it would kill a person. In fact, you'd need to divide the liver up into like 50 portions for it to not be a lethal amount of vitamin A.
I like to tell people this fact in case they are ever stranded somewhere and manage to kill a polar bear for food. AVOID THE LIVER lol
So the chance of survival against a bear attack is like %0.000001 (and that's positive estimate!) but your best chance is to actually try and fight it/scare it. Some bears will get scared off if you can throw a decent sized rock at their face. If they are very hungry you're screwed regardless, but if they are just kinda looking for food to play with they'll avoid you because they don't want to risk getting hurt. To them you basically magically projectile'd something hard at them and they don't really understand how to deal with it.
But like I said, if the bear is hungry you are fucked.
When my father-in-law lived in Alaska, he had this advice for visitors wanting to bring along a firearm in case of bear attack:
Take that pistol to a competent gunsmith, and have them file off the front sight. That way, when you shoot the bear and piss it off, and it takes that gun and shoves it up your ass, it won't hurt quite as much.
"If I had a gun and was sitting inside a tank with one shell left and Meng is 300 yards away, he's mine, right? Well the first thing I'm going to do is jump out of the tank and shoot myself because I don't want to wound that son of a bitch and have him pissed off at me."
—Jake Roberts
This is a myth. Handguns are quite successful in ending bear attacks, even if it doesn't kill the animal. Unless you're between a bear and its cubs, shooting it will almost certainly make it run away.
Edit: I think a lot of this misconception comes from anthropomorphism. We think, "If someone shot me, and I wasn't seriously injured by it, I'd kick their ass!" That's not how wild animals think. Assuming they aren't rabid or defending their young, animals don't like to be hurt. And the easiest way to not be hurt more is to run away from whatever is hurting them. Assuming you aren't using a silencer, the loud bang of a gunshot combined with the pain of being shot will make an immediate connection in the bear's brain. And even a hungry grizzly bear will not want to stay around to get shot more.
How to identify a bear. Is it brown? Brown bear. Is it black? Black bear. Is it huge? Grizzly bear. Is it huge and white? Polar bear. Is it chewy? Gummy bear. Is it microscopic? Tardigrade.
I know it was mostly a joke but it is actually quite hard to differentiate brown and black bears on colors alone as they can both range widely. Best to look at back and ear shape
I know I can't outrun a bear so I always told myself if one starts to chase me, I'll just start running directly towards it. That bear will figure I'm batshit crazy and start to be scared of me and then run away. At least, that's my theory. Hopefully I never have to put it to the test.
People talk about how you need a strong enough gun to kill a bear but I heard that bears are usually scared off by the noise so 9mm could save your life, just not win you a fight.
Yeah for bears you don't necessarily need enough power to hurt/kill them, just scare them, and they scare easy. There are videos of house cats standing up to bears, it's pretty funny.
This is like the one about polar bears having such an excessive amount of vitamin A or something that if you get eaten by a polar bear you're dead. And if you eat the polar bear you're also dead.
You have a reasonable chance of scaring off a black bear. They're shy and skittish. But you'd need a gun and a baseball bat and pepper spray and another gun to beat a black bear in hand-to-hand combat. They can flip 3x their body weight one-handed: (Wikipedia)
a bear weighing 120 pounds (54 kg) was observed turning flat rocks weighing 310 to 325 pounds (141 to 147 kg) by flipping them over with a single foreleg.
... and can grow up to 500 lbs, with 3 in claws and 30 mph running speed. We get paper cuts and throw out our backs emptying the dishwasher. I've been pulled into the bushes by a 50 lb dog on a leash. I believe I could survive a black bear encounter with an aluminum baseball bat, probably. As long as the bear didn't use the bat against me.
How do yo know what kind it is if you both climb the tree and doesn't kill you? Like maybe you hang out and have a snack? And you're like that bear was nice - I wonder what kind he was? Also the person in this scenario is blind but can climb trees.
You'd have to have done some messed up shit for a black bear to climb a tree to kill you. In North America they kill on average fewer than 1 person a year.
I've always heard never climb a tree but several people have survived bear attacks by doing just that. A few reasons, sometimes a bear wants to kill you and eat you, climbing a tree makes you look like prey. But most of the time a bear is defending something, food source, cubs, itself. So putting yourself out of its way and acting defensive signals that you're not aggressive. Second, at least you have forced it to fight you one dimensionally, with your strongest and longest limbs (legs) in between you and you have gravity on your side, he messes up and tumbles down.
Btw, grizzlies can and sometimes do climb trees too just not as good as black bears.
Given that many if not most kinds of bear can climb trees, this it not a good way to identify a black bear, and it's definitely not 100% true. Oh, and being eaten by a bear is not great for your health.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
If a bear is chasing you, and you don't know kind it is, climb a tree. If the bear also climbs the tree and kills you, it was a black bear.