“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!”
And that’s how I got hit by a bus.
From my experiences in the woods, the bear would turn around and walk/trot away.
Typically. I’ve had a few “I’m startled / you’re startled” situations where there was a prolonged standing and staring at each other before slowly ambling off in different directions. Never closer than about 10 feet though.
I think if you round a corner and come nose to nose with a bear prudence dictates some sort of retreat. Seems to me that proximity = provocation.
While a bear certainly can and may run you down they also may not.
The slow backing away while remaining tall is the recommended method. (Whether one can maintain the presence to do that, is another matter.)
Hey! I have a right to bear arms.
Considering his final years, Churchill should’ve run away from a lot of stuffed goose dinners and his many flagons of breakfast champagne.
Not restricted to calicos either. Have seen plenty of house cats totally rule roost over dogs 3-6x their weight.
As for pranks, I’ll stick to rotating (in software) people’s screens when they leave their computers unlocked. Although one time I did invent a windows sound profile for a homophobic coworker that played snippets of “It’s Raining Men” whenever anything happened.
Windows has an exhaustive list of possible sound events. You couldn’t move your mouse without snippets playing and after a minute or two the computer just dies. Loudly. With the loops still looping for forever (AFAIK … I powered the system down the bad way). I didn’t deploy it because it was too destructive.
Perhaps, but calicos (and torties in general) have that DGAF reputation (which as a cat lover I know is silly since it’s just a coloration, not a breed but it seems appropriate).
I’d never encounter a bear. Not accidentally anyway. I’m far too loud for a bear not to notice.
I’ve been trained on numerous occasions the best thing to do when unexpectedly encountering a bear at close range on even terrain is to make oneself look big, don’t stop yelling at it, and stand your ground.
If you take off running, it will give chase, just like most predators.
If you’re near a steep hill, and a bear advances on you, it’s preferable to run downhill as fast as you can. Bears don’t like running downhill because they’re prone to tumbling.
never climb a tree to escape a bear. That’ll at best trap you with a bear on the ground, and at worst trap you with a bear who can just climb up after you.
I never learned how to deal with cougars. The reason given typically was “that cougar’s already decided to eat you if you see it” so the solution for those is typically shooting them.
Most of that is the advice I grew up with. You can sometimes scare off cougar as well, but they can be so stealthy they usually have already decided to leave you alone or are looking to jump on you from behind.
Most of my (daytime) bear encounters have been me coming across them, but I have had them come into camp at night, and had a mother with two cubs walk into a meadow by a lake where I was fishing.
I was sitting there and caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned towards the motion and it was a large bear and 2 small ones that had stood up to look at me over some tall grass. They were a good 30 feet away, so I stood up faced them and said: “hey bears!” They looked for a moment and plopped back down and wandered off. I stayed standing there until I couldn’t see them, or hear them anymore. Then a bit longer…
Well he probably already knew he could run faster than his friend. So he was just conserving energy by not doing any wasted motions.
Your mistake was running rather than sidestepping. Ever notice how nobody on TV sidesteps the massive vehicle chasing them? They just run down the fucking road, staying where the vehicle can follow them easily.
I’ve heard the opposite; a cougar you can see isn’t one you need to worry about. Sort of like how you never hear the bullet that kills you.
Are you saying cougars attack at relativistic speed, or have cloaking devices?
Maybe @L_Mariachi played Red Dead Redemption. In that game you rarely saw the cougar that killed you until it was too late.
I’ve seen more than a few and that’s exactly what I did in almost every case, even if the bear was already running away when I noticed it. I’d let loose, loudly, with reasons why that bear should run away, secretly thrilled that bears don’t usually speak English so they wouldn’t know their pride was being trampled.
The one time I saw a bear and didn’t scream something was because the bear was absolutely ginormous (somewhere in the Northern Cascades) and I was utterly and completely stupefied. The thing walked out of dense brush and down a dry streambed right in front of me and with absolute silence. Two minutes later, it walked back into the brush and was gone from sight.
Definitely. It’s the cows that have the speed-limiting airframe:
If by “well armed”, you mean one in which firearms training is part and parcel with gun ownership, where toddlers aren’t allowed close enough to guns to shoot their parents, where some sense of sober responsibility is foundational to gun culture- then I doubt there would be that much risk to the prankster.
But if you’re talking a typical American red state, I totally agree! (I just wouldn’t call it “well armed” so much as “highly armed”)
Highly, perhaps even hyper, armed indeed.
