I'm reading "Bears chased their dogs. These 60-somethings jumped in and got injured" (WaPo).
How far would you go to protect your dog? For two 60-somethings in Maine and Connecticut, doing so involved fighting a bear.... Wildlife authorities say that dog owners should walk their pets on a short leash that doesn’t retract, and that people should remove all sources of food, including bird feeders or bird seed, from outdoor spaces because they can attract bears.... According to the National Park Service, if you surprise a bear and it is not acting in a predatory way toward you, you should wave your arms to show the bear that you are human and then "slowly and calmly back away while avoiding direct eye contact."...
By the way, if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene? Keep your dog on a short leash and you won't face that test of dog love, like that 64-year-old lady who punched a bear in the nose.
ADDED: They're discussing the Maine incident at the subreddit Dogfree: "Woman has her dog off leash and it goes and harasses a bear in the woods. She then attacks the bear for chasing her dog and gets bitten. Of course now they are putting out traps for the bear."
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47 comments:
"Keep your dog on a short leash and you won't face that test of dog love..."
Guaranteed? Me thinks not.
For the previous 300,000 years the solution to this problem was very simple...kill the bears and protect humans. Now the bears have more rights than we do.
The routine practice in Alaska and bear-heavy locations is to carry old-school "bear spray":
https://www.outdoorlife.com/guns/best-bear-defense-handguns/
"By the way, if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene?"
Absolutely. The decision is easier if you're always armed. I love my two English labs. They are members of my family. That said my boiz are big enough they could probably overpower a 160lb black bear between them, in which case the bear might be asking me for help, not vice versa.
Fido, it's been nice knowing you.
Here in Florida it's the gators that'll get Dorothy. And her little dog, too!
"Wave your arms to show that you are human."
"Remember the signal?"
"Smart ass mother fucker!"
"slowly and calmly back away while avoiding direct eye contact."...
Same advice for the subway.
Unfortunately, my instinct would be to protect the dog, assuming my dog wasn't snack-sized.
That makes no sense. Do you value your life over your dog's life if a predatory animal is peeved at you, and you are short leashing the dog? Any dog worth its salt definitely values your life over their own and knows you're not being rational.
Carry a gun or bear spray if necessary; know that most dogs and bears don't have it in for each other if they can do otherwise, and have an honest respect that nature is ultimately red in tooth and claw.
I had a four pound cat that chased a baby bear away -- likely not out of fear, but the bear didn't want the hissing bother.
Wouldn't the best solution be to let the dog off the leash and run away? The dog has a much better chance to outrun or avoid a bear than a human does.
Hell no I wouldn't intervene. Bears start by tearing off your face. Very tricky to reattach.
And yeah, kill the bears! Hiking just isn't fun anymore.
You don't have to be able to outrun the bear, only the other potential prey.
Cue Bill Bryson's bells joke.
"Wave your arms to show that you are human"
Wave your hands in the air like you don't care,
glide by the people as they start to look and stare.
Do you dance, do your dance quick.
Mama, come on baby, tell me what's the word... ah Word Up...
The reason having the dog on a short leash helps is that the bear never encounters the dog without a human attached. In both the cases described in the article, a dog and a bear came together without the human present, then the human witnessed the problem and chose to intervene. I think the point made in the article is that bears avoid contact with humans, so if you stay close by your dog, the encounter won't happen in the first place.
That's not to say a bear will always avoid a person, just to say that people who let their dogs roam away from them are more likely to run into this problem.
Quite apart from issues with bears, I have a problem with people who bring dogs out on trails and don't keep them on a short leash. The other day, I encountered a scary looking dog that was on a leash that must have been 40 feet long. The leash lay on the ground in a zigzag pattern, so that the dog was free to lunge quite a distance before the leash had any effect. The dog person noticed that I saw the situation and laughed that laugh that's supposed to mean something like: "I know I'm not following the rules, but silly me, I'm just out here having fun with my doggo — me, a fun-loving, silly person, so won't you laugh back to communicate that we're all dog lovers here?"
Yeah, I have a problem with people who don't leash their dogs tightly or, worse, don't leash/fence them in at all. When I was still running, the situation was so bad I started carrying a large hunting knife in a sheath in case I needed it- and I still carry a sharpened walking stick when I go walking outdoors. I haven't had to kill a dog yet, but I figure it will happen eventually.
Carry a gun or bear spray if necessary; know that most dogs and bears don't have it in for each other if they can do otherwise, and have an honest respect that nature is ultimately red in tooth and claw.
+ 1, with the caveat that the firearm should have enough power to stop a charging bear. A .38 revolver or a 9mm will just get the beast angry.
That's not to say a bear will always avoid a person,
Darsh Patel could confirm this, except that they found parts of him inside the belly of a black bear in Pennsylvania.
Quite apart from issues with bears, I have a problem with people who bring dogs out on trails and don't keep them on a short leash.
And you won’t believe how pissed the dog owners get when you spray the dog in the face with something irritating. But how is a hiker to know that the animal isn’t rapid or otherwise dangerously aggressive? Some dog owners have the same attitude towards laws and regulations that bike riders do.
Big Mike’s 11:27 bears repeating.
If there are bears in your neighborhood you should be carrying a weapon.
Kind of an IQ test.
If my dog is tied up, I’ll make an effort to untie it so it can move freely. After that, unless I have a weapon, it’s every dog for itself.
...so emo, yet do nothing...
I don't understand why it's suddenly a thing to bring dogs into Home Depot or Lowes.
If a certified trainer is teaching a dog for the handicapped or blind, the dog wears an official cloak with instructions for not interacting with it. That's fine, and they're well-behaved and trained to ignore sensory overload already.
But I've seen big dogs freak out at a pallet of wood being dropped, and dogs barking at carts and people, and one canine fella scribing the drywall, if you know what I mean.
Why would any store owner, or their insurance company, take on that sort of potential liability? Dogs do not like hardware warehouses. What's next, cats?
“+ 1, with the caveat that the firearm should have enough power to stop a charging bear. A .38 revolver or a 9mm will just get the beast angry.”
In AZ, I carry a 9 mm G17/19 with SD ammo for coyotes but in MT, I carry a 10 mm G20 with (15+1) bear loads. That is critical. A guy down by Raton a couple years ago blew through his entire 15+1 SD rounds stopping a black bear. He woke in the hospital, and the bear apparently died with its jaws clamped on his leg. Self Defense (SD) rounds mushroom. That’s fine with coyotes (wolves, mountain lions, etc), but can be fatal to the shooter, in the case of bears. Bear loads are typically solid cast, in order to maximize penetration. 10 mm, and esp G20s, are the most popular bear guns and rounds in MT. For me, it’s because I can get most of a magazine into a charging bear, but with a more powerful revolver, the recoil is stiff enough that I likely won’t get a second shot on target.
So, yes, I will shoot a charging bear if they go after my dog. If they are going after leashed dogs, humans are next, and that is a death sentence for the bear. Ditto for coyotes, of course. They will go over a six foot block fence to take dogs late at night, so our dog doesn’t stay out overnight. We try to avoid bears, as best we can. Last year, in MT, the dog alerted, and we both pulled back. Then we heard a bear’s distinctive “woof”. She’s good at that - several times she alerted on rattle snakes, in AZ, that I hadn’t seen.
Making camp just over the Mono Pass in southern Sierra with family. Two bears amble in.
Pound aluminum pot and yell. They split. Wife returns to camp. Only mentioned when necessary.
Yancy said: and I still carry a sharpened walking stick when I go walking outdoors.
YES! if you see gilbar walking in the Turkey River Valley..
He'll be walking with his aluminum wading staff.. It's NOT because he thinks he might be swept away
Duty of Inquiry said...
If there are bears in your neighborhood you should be carrying a weapon.
Doesn't the 2nd amendment explicitly state this? Something about bear arms, i'm sure
Meade writes, "Big Mike’s 11:27 bears repeating."
It also bares repeating.
Couple of things. By weird coincidence we just watched "Grizzly Man" yesterday. Gotta admit seeing this story was a bit creepier than it would have been...before that.
Second, I would likely protect my dog without thinking. Might not be smart, but it is what it is.
Third, here (TX) we have coyotes and the occasional bobcat. Dog is ALWAYS on a leash and eyes always looking. The goal is to see danger and steer clear before any encounters can occur at all.
Althouse writes, "By the way, if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene?"
Yeah. There's a moral obligation involved.
Bears are utterly unpredictable. This waving your arms to show you're human is bullshit. It may work, but it probably won't. Bears are not primarily visual predators. Their image of the world is built of smells, sounds, and sights in that order. It is difficult for humans to appreciate a bear's sensory impressions because our olfactory bulbs are a small fraction of one percent of our brain mass, whereas a bear has more than 2000 times more olfactory neurons than we have. We have the edge on them visually, however. Not only do we have a broader color space and better depth perception, but humans also have an image-based memory. How bears order their memories and responses is conjectural at best, but if the smell of pizza can evoke non-specific memories in us, it probably evokes memories of specific locations and landmarks along the way to that location in a bear that once dined Italian. Given their brain morphology and visual acuity by the time a bear can see you're waving your arms it has already launched an attack that is highly unlikely to be aborted.
The National Park Service can offer warrantless advice because no one can bring the Service into court if a loved one gets eaten after trying the recommended tactic on a real bear. A good rule of thumb regarding advice is its worth is directly proportional to the responsibility of the advisor, and the Park Service's responsibility here is zip. The entire reason for this WaPo article is the Biden Admins' hostility to the Constitution. They'd like to continue to enforce their blanket prohibition ban on firearms within national park boundaries, even though hikers and campers are always at risk of bear attacks. The waving arms fraud is just part of their "guns are not necessary" summation.
A single dog, leashed or not, has no chance against an adult bear. Two or more large dogs are needed and the dogs will probably die soon after the bear does. Use a dog on a short leash for providing alerts; use @Bruce Hayden's gun advice for defense as he describes. Bear spray will only anger a bear. Ditto his advice when in Appalachia.
As for coyotes snatching dogs from your patio, be aware that coyotes learn our habits. If you put your smallish dog out every morning, a crafty coyote, hiding on your enclosed patio, will snatch the dog immediately after you close the door.
How far would you go to protect your dog from a bird watcher in Central Park?
If there is a bear.
@ Meade
Okay, "bares repeating" was a rather attenuated joke.
If it bears repeating, you need an automatic firearm.
@queastor, yes but your 2:52 comment sheer was good.
12 gauge Remington 1100, 5 rounds, slug, buckshot, slug and so on….as far as handguns, anything is better than nothing but it’s hard to shoot a caliber over .357
Fuck all this! I believe in the right to arm bears.
Things I learned about bears after moving from a suburb of Washington, DC, to a location in the Shenandoah Valley not that far from the George Washington National Forest:
- If it’s hungry enough a black bear will come right up on your deck in the early hours of the morning to raid your bird feeders, even though you have a bright dusk-to-dawn light shining there on the deck. Two of the feeders were repairable but i only found a couple small bits and pieces of the third. I assume it was a black bear because whatever it was was strong enough to bend a 3/8 inch steel bolt 90 degrees. So probably not a skunk or raccoon.
- As a corollary, bring your feeders in at dusk.
- According to friends who hunt (I don’t) if charged by a bear while armed try to stop the charge by shooting the bear in the shoulder to stop the charge. Don’t try a head shot until the creature is immobilized since the bear’s skull is thick and flat, so there is a risk of a ricochet instead of penetration.
- If attacked by a grizzly, curl up, protect your face, and play dead. If it attacked because you got between a sow and her cubs or otherwise perceived you as a threat, you might survive. If a black bear attacks, it is hungry and plans to eat you. Fight. For. Your. Life.
Bears are individuals and don't always follow the stereotype. I've had many park rangers tell me that bears are unpredictable and are best avoided. They give lines like, "You can tell the difference between bear scat and other animal scat by the pepper spray smell and the occasional bear bell" (Bear bells are what hikers carry to try and scare the grizzlies away and some of the bears appear to like pepper spray) or the park ranger who thought he'd show a boy scout troop how to deal with the bear eating their breakfast while they hid in their vehicles (I startled it off the table and it started to take off, but then it stopped, and you could see it thinking 'why am _I_ running?' after which joined the scouts in their vehicle."
Quastor,
What blanket prohibition ban on firearms within national park boundaries?
“- According to friends who hunt (I don’t) if charged by a bear while armed try to stop the charge by shooting the bear in the shoulder to stop the charge. Don’t try a head shot until the creature is immobilized since the bear’s skull is thick and flat, so there is a risk of a ricochet instead of penetration.”
Sorry. I’m going for head shots - between the eyes, or in the ear. That’s why I carry a 10 mm loaded with bear loads - their purpose being to penetrate their thick skulls. Even better would be depleted uranium, but that is hard to get ahold of. Now the dynamic may be different with a hunting rifle, since your are talking much more powerful rounds, but softer than typical handgun bear rounds. But that really wasn’t what was at issue here. If a bear tries to enter the house, I have a .44 Mag lever gun with bear rounds, and a .300 Win Mag with hunting rounds, by the front door.
Mountain man Ben Lilly, who hunted with Theodore Roosevelt on at least one occasion, killed bears mano a mano, using nothing but a knife of his own design with an s-shaped blade.
@Bruce Hayden, I’m just passing along what genuine outdoorsmen told me. I assume their concern was meeting a bear while deer hunting, especially if hunting black powder so that they had one shot and to stop the charge. My home bear defense is an 870 loaded with high velocity bear slugs.
For Kim Parker:
From your link
Use of Firearms
Unless authorized, the use or discharge of a firearm within a park area is prohibited. 36 CFR 2.4(b) and 13.30(c). In parks where hunting is specifically mandated or authorized by federal statute, firearms may be used to hunt in accordance with NPS regulations and state laws. 36 CFR 2.2.
Visitors should not consider firearms as protection from wildlife.
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