A Good Representation of Size

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by afterburn 549

Horses, bears and other large critters- are going to kill you and make it look like a mistake.
It might even be a mistake, the results are the same.
Once one lives on a farm with big animals it is learned it is just a matter of time.

[Tobra]

Originally Posted by sc_rufctr

I've heard running down hill is your best option but at some point you'll run out of down hill.

Can you run faster than 30 miles an hour if you go downhill?

I saw a grizzly bear in Montana one time, through binoculars from across a river, so you don't get a good sense of size. My buddy showed me a tree that one had marked up. It was higher than I could jump, and I could do a two hand dunk of a basketball at the time.

Rattle your keys, whistle, hit your walking stick on branches. Ostensibly, they want to run into you about as much as you want to run into them. I am 100% sure that is not the case. Hang your food far from where you are sleeping. A black bear can get into a car with no problem. I shudder to think what an aroused half ton of Ursus horribilis could do. You could probably kill one with a .44 pistol, but it would maybe kill you too before it died.

[rusnak]

Originally Posted by afterburn 549

Horses, bears and other large critters- are going to kill you and make it look like a mistake.
It might even be a mistake, the results are the same.
Once one lives on a farm with big animals it is learned it is just a matter of time.

Are you SERIOUSLY putting a horse, cow, donkey, and sheep into the same category as a BEAR?

I just want to point out that you are not all there upstairs:



btw this is CGI

[legion]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Treadwell

In October 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend,[1] physician assistant Amie Huguenard (born October 23, 1965, in Buffalo, New York), visited Katmai National Park, which is on the Alaska Peninsula across Shelikof Strait from Kodiak Island. In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog states that according to Treadwell's diaries, Huguenard feared bears and felt very uncomfortable in their presence. Her final journal entries indicated that she wanted to be away from Katmai.[10] Treadwell chose to set his campsite near a salmon stream where grizzlies commonly feed in autumn. Treadwell was in the park later in the year than normal,[2] at a time when bears attempt to gain as much fat as possible before winter. Food was scarce that fall, causing the grizzly bears to be even more aggressive than usual.[11]
...
Around noon on Sunday, October 5, 2003, Treadwell spoke with an associate in Malibu, California, by satellite phone; Treadwell mentioned no problems with any bears. The next day, October 6, Willy Fulton, a Kodiak air taxi pilot, arrived at Treadwell and Huguenard's campsite to pick them up but found the area abandoned, except for a bear, and contacted the local park rangers....

Read the rest at your own risk.

[drcoastline]

Nope not me, I would not be anywhere near that thing. I saw a Kodiak or a Grizzly at an RV show once. As big as the bear in the first post. May have been that bear. It was in a cage. It was enormous. The owner gave it a large bucket of KFC. The bear poured the chicken in it's mouth Chewed maybe three times and swallowed everything. He then gave the bear a bunch of apples. It looked like the bear was eating grapes.

[rusnak]

Originally Posted by afterburn 549

I am not an expert but pretty well informed-and once lived in Alaska.

I never had to shoot any bear ever - but the not is,- never fall into a compromised scenario or lose self-awareness.
Tredwell is proof bears are not out to eat people.
People do stupid things usually.
And dont try to outrun bear dwn hill or any other way.
In fact to run is as a mouse running from a cat, inviting a pursuit.
NEVER play dead with a black bear. If he is after you you are on the menu.
A Grizz? Well, take your punishment as he/she is going to discipline you and you might live. Rarely will a brown eat you.

Black bears become monkeys when in trees, I have seen them jump to another!
Amazing they are !
Bears are awesome critters, like anything it can have a moment when it gets sour mood I do suppose..
We, humans, are just wimps compared to them.
I would not want to be around one having that bad moment.

You do know that Treadwell and his girlfriend were eaten, right? The video shows his empty ribcage after his guts were eaten, torn free from his legs.

[sc_rufctr]

A smaller bear but this is amazing.

[Crowbob]

I was cruising down the freeway in medium traffic and at full gallop a black bear dashed out from the woods on my right ran across two lanes of freeway, a very large grassy median across two more lanes of medium traffic in the other direction and into the woods.

That bear looked straight ahead without even glancing in any direction. I estimate it was going 30mph! It happened so fast and was so unexpected it didn't register what was happening. That thing was FAST!

Another time what I thought at first was a VW Bug turned out to be a black bear running down the middle of the on-ramp just ahead of me.

[unclebilly]

I had a close encounter with a Kodiak about that size at the camp at the base of the golden stairs on the Chilcoot Trail about 15 years ago. He was 2 feet behind me...

I had 4 serious bear encounters over 3 days. The more serious one was 24 hours later when a momma treed her cub standing next to my tent and backpack. My bear spray was hanging on my pack. I fired off a bear banger and ran like hell.

[widebody911]

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by afterburn 549

POST 27 acknowledges that fact

Bears are reported to smell 4 to 600 times better than a good dog!

Old Native American proverb: When the leaf falls in the forest, the deer hears it, the sheep sees it, and the bear smells it.

I have an older book of wildlife photography that includes a chapter on bears. The photographer, in one instance, spent a good deal of time observing a barren ground grizzly mother and her two cubs. From a distance, of course. He relates how it took him a few weeks with them to begin to realize that momma bear was absolutely blind. Didn't seem to matter much to her - she got along fine on scent and sound.

[flipper35]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

Many years ago a hunting guide and I were discussing what kinds of side arms would be most useful in grizzly country. His advice for those traveling alone was to carry something you could get to your own chin quickly and pull the trigger while getting pummeled on the ground by one of these things. Believing any sidearm could stop one of these things is simply wishful thinking. His advice for anyone traveling in a group, or with a partner, was to carry a .22, and use it to kneecap the other guy.

Decades ago a guy was attacked by a polar bear and all he had was a .357. He waited until the bear was over him and shot it in the head from underneath between the jawbones.

My luck the bear would fall on me and crush me.

[pitargue]

Wish the California state animal (on the state flag) was still in existence in the state.

Went for a hike in the east side of the San Francisco Bay at the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge. There's a plaque that says the bay once was full of grizzlies, wolves and the sky was black because of all the migratory birds. Imagine that!

[Tobra]

There was a time when it would take days for a flock of passenger pigeons to pass, now they are gone.

[Jeff Higgins]

I am absolutely 100% behind the re-introduction of the native California "golden bear". I believe the last one verified there was probably late 19th century. It's an absolute crime, what mankind has done to them, eradicating them from their natural haunts. It's high time they are restored across their historic range. For the life of me, I cannot understand why our modern day wildlife organizations - the same ones that have put so much effort into, for example, wolf recovery - are not all over this. It seems like an obvious "next step" towards restoring the natural balance of the State of California.

[rusnak]

How do you kick all of the people out of the L.A. basin? I'd like to see more cougars and fewer hobos but OTOH, there are already too many lizards. Maybe we just spray paint the bums golden and call it good.

[Jeff Higgins]

I was, of course, being facetious. For the most part, anyway.

There are plenty of truly wild places left in California. That may be hard to grasp from somewhere like the L.A. basin, the Bay Area, and other large population centers, but but a few days spent up north in places like Humboldt County, or up in the Sierra Nevada range, and places like that would demonstrate just how much wilderness remains in California. These areas would be eminently suitable for a large scale reintroduction of the Golden Bear.

Not that I wouldn't mind seeing them in the Los Angeles Basin, or in the Bay Area. Many of the activists that insist we need more wolves in my state, or in my neighboring states, hail from these areas. It would be nice to give them a really big, brown, somewhat cantankerous taste of their own medicine. But that's just being petty and vindictive. I'm sure a few of these roaming the Basin or the Bay Area would serve to discourage camping on your sidewalks, however...

[rusnak]

The great North American Humboldt bear (formerly known as the California Brown, or Grizzly Bear):


No longer an "apex predator", presumably due to a lack of wildlife in the post-1924 California "wilderness", today's nuevo era bear has made peace with the universe through a vegan diet consisting of locally available vegetables..

[Jeff Higgins]

I think they might actually prefer locally available vegans...

[rusnak]

https://www.salon.com/2013/06/30/how_humboldt_became_americas_marijuana_capital/