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Another gun question?
Looking for some suggestions,
We have about 6 acres next to almost endless state land. Wife would like to ride her horses on some of the many trails out there. About a week ago I came home from work and chased a bear down the driveway with the 944, the car gripped the corners (gravel drive), but the bear’s back end was a bit loose. The bear knew he was out of his league, so he shifted into 4x4 mode and left the track. I might have seen a cougar a few weeks ago on the main road, not sure. Anyway she went out to feed her horses the other night and heard something close to the house growling, she says it was a cat growl but almost sounded like human noises before the growl? Maybe bobcat. I looked around the next morning and couldn’t find any prints. Now she wants a side arm to carry with her at night while feeding her money pits and when she rides them off the property. The property, I partially cleared a couple acres after we moved here last summer for her animals the rest of the property is like a rain forest, plenty of places for animals to hide. Oh, and during the growl attack our old yellow lab mix was barking her head off with every hair standing straight up. We just got a new puppy, not sure what it is, maybe Australian Shepard. Thinking about getting one more dog because the old one is starting to have trouble getting around. Oh yea, my question is what side arm should she carry? I have a stainless Ruger redhawk, 44 mag 7.25” barrel, I know she can handle it but it’s still a big gun to pull out in a panic. Wife went to college on a track scholarship, discus, javelin and shot put, strong girl. She has a little shooting experience, rifles I think. I’m thinking a revolver for ease of use in a panic situation, short barrel, .357. Any suggestions? Thanks, Steve |
Go with the SW 629 44 mag in a 4 in barrel, it's light easy to shoot and packs a punch .. I love mine
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If it's a cougar or mountain lion, I doubt a handgun would do much good. Can't hurt, but typically those animals are extremely good at not being seen unless they're attacking. And if they're attacking, it's pretty much too late. Also worth noting (and you probably know this already if you live up there) that cougars & moutain lions do not "bluff charge" like bears will. If they attack, they're trying to kill you. You're in a fight to the death.
Either mountain lions or cougars typically won't bother you though - attacks on humans are very rare unless you look like easy prey (i.e. small children walking alone) |
There was a good thread, either here or on gunbroker. The conclusion was that the best defense for bear was pepper spray -- better "stopping power" than most handguns. I can't find that thread now, but here is some discussion:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/426646-denali-bicycle-safety-tips-please.html |
Thanks for the replies,
I know the attacks are rare, but it’s more of having a little peace of mind. I figure on the property she will have some warning from dogs, I don’t think that the predators will come around if you have a couple good sized dogs, however there is a ton of rabbits here (wild) and a couple cats. Could have been a coyote, have seen them around. I was at work when it happened, didn’t get to hear it. If she is out riding, I would think the horse would get attacked, give her a chance to get away. Never ride alone. Most cougar attacks come from behind, they jump on you and try to bite your head/ neck. I really don’t think it will happen, but if it ever did, you might have time to pull the gun and shoot, a .44 mag going off might scare the critter away. I’ll have to get here a Rambo knife also. |
Pepper spray, I like that idea. Poor wife will have to carry a 50lb utility belt. Holly bear poo batman, we should use the horses as bait. When the cats are done feeding they will be slow due to their full bellies. easier too shoot. This will save me a ton of money, no horses means more P cars. I like this.
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I have also heard that bear spray is most effective unless you want to carry a .44 mag. around with you. When I ride out in the bush, I usually bring a .357SIG, which might suffice for what we have for wildlife out here. But anything bigger than a small black bear and I'd want a .44 mag. and/or bear spray. I know it wouldn't matter in a life or death situation, but I can't imagine shooting a .44 mag. without ear protection. It would be about the same as a punch in the face.
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Ginny and Rusty, at rented barn before we moved.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1223747755.jpg |
Making a pasture/ mudd pit, and horses on property.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1223748441.jpg http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1223748470.jpg |
44 is ineffective against a grizzly/brown bear
no pistol is -- unless you are lucky to scare yourself really well, read Stephen Herrero, Bear Attacks he is a prof. at U. Calgary who studies bears otoh, a friend of mine [a museum prof. no less - often stereotyped as nerds] came down from climbing one time and found a grizzly in his tent eating up his food -- he got pissed, yelled at it and started wailing on it with his ice axe -- exit one scared bear later, he said he thought it was a young one [2-3 years maybe] so it would have been easier to educate... also the recent story of the guy who killed a mother bear with a big stick -- apparently a brown bear maybe the bears swap stories about don't F with those primates... |
Considering there are no Grizzlies in Wash State ( or very few) I assume we were talking about black bears.. and big cats certainly don't take lead well.
I've killed or witnessed enough brown bear/ grizzly kills to tell you that a well placed 44 mag is plenty of firepower to at least ward off an attack.. I certainly don't have a problem hanging out with the big boys when my 44 is strapped on my hip.. Granted I'd rather have my 375 H&H but it's a bit big to have all the time |
I'm sorry, but all this business about .44 mags 'not being effective' just strikes me as baloney. You shoot a cow with a .44 mag loaded with a hard cast Keith bullet its going to go in its nose and come out its ass. No, a charging Grizzly will not be stopped dead in its tracks, but it sure as hell is going to mortally wounded with a well placed shot.
I'm not saying that pepper spray isn't the better option, but I just think there is some really baloney surrounding the whole bear/gun issue. I carry a .357 Blackhawk loaded with 200gr hard cast CorBons in the outdoors. There are no grizzlys in WA. Frankly I'm more worried about meth heads than bears. Bear in full charge, muzzle blast sends bear running: http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=uMbnmLLnsfw Can anyone point to single confirmed instance of a bear being shot and continuing the attack? |
[QUOTE=HardDrive;4232927]I'm sorry, but all this business about .44 mags 'not being effective' just strikes me as baloney. You shoot a cow with a .44 mag loaded with a hard cast Keith bullet is going to go in its nose and come out its ass. No, a charging Grizzly will not be stopped dead in its tracks, but it sure as hell is going to mortally wounded with a well placed shot.
I agree !! 44 Mag is quite effective on Griz. I live 50 Min north of Yellowstone, the Montana fish and game and the Yellowstone park rangers prove this point at least once or twice a season. I even know a bow hunter that is here today, because he was ready when the time came. There are bigger guns but the 44 Mag is the choice of the pros. Hands down! When handled correctly it is extremely effective on grizzly bears. |
well you morons do whatever baloney you want -- have a friend in a tree to take some pics and maybe I can use them next time I teach mammalogy
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The Montana State Department of Fish and Wildlife is advising golfers to take extra precautions and be on the alert for bears while in the Gallatin, Helena and Lewis and Clark National Forests golf courses.
They advise golfers to wear noise-producing devices such as little bells on their clothing to alert, but not startle the bears unexpectedly. They also advise you to carry pepper spray in case of an encounter with a bear. It is also a good idea to watch for signs of bear activity. Golfers should be able to recognize the difference between black bear and grizzly bear droppings on the golf course. Black bear droppings are smaller and contain berries and possibly squirrel fur. Grizzly bear droppings have bells in them and smell like pepper spray. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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Not too worried about the bear, he was a small black bear. Harddrive is right, no grizzlies, and the meth heads are the biggest problem. The guy neighbor behind us was out burning a brush pile today, so I go over and talk to him, first thing he says is, have you Heard the cougar yet? I'm thinking there are two of them, working as a team. I will call them the Ghost and the darkness.
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How about the taurus judge for cougar protection?
http://www.taurususa.com/video/taurus-theJudge-video.cfm |
New Dog? Do a search on Anatolian Shepherd.
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If I recall correctly, Alaska has a state mandate to investigate all bear attacks. The last time I checked, no successful self defense against a Grizzly or Brown Bear has been recorded. True Brown Bears (not brown colored Black Bears) in attack mode are difficult to stop. Giving it a deadly wound that takes affect after the bear mauling you is not optimum!
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the first time you'll be aware of a cougar attack is when it's knocked you off your horse, and has you pinned to the ground. i would probably want a snub nosed .38.
but a big .44 revolver is the best choice for all around. we could get into a big discussion over ammo. i've listened to guys go on for hours over wether ball or hollowpoint is best for stopping a bear. RPKSEQ, where did you see the alaska bear attack stats. i'd be interested in reading them. |
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http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/wildlife/bears/story/560712.html
Unusual hunting ground even for Alaska Bureaucratic crack is bear's undoing By CRAIG MEDRED cmedred@adn.com Published: October 19th, 2008 01:35 AM Last Modified: October 19th, 2008 10:56 AM Not often does a man open the back door of his home, poke out the barrel of his rifle and shoot a monster-size grizzly in Alaska. Story tools Comments (90) Recommend (10) E-mail a friend Digg this Seed Newsvine Send link via AIM Yahoo! Buzz Font size : A | A | A Maybe the door of a cabin along some remote bay on Kodiak Island, where 1,000-pound bears are expected to roam, but certainly not the door of a home in an Anchorage suburb. Yet this is exactly what Chugiak resident Kurt Sorensen did. Twenty-two feet from his home, he shot a grizzly that measured about 8 feet from nose to tail, Sorensen said. Standing on its hind legs, it would have towered around 10 feet. Alaska Department Fish and Game biologist Sean Farley, who has weighed a lot of grizzly bears over the years, estimated the dead bear's weight to be at least 1,000 pounds -- about the size of three big, burly NFL linemen. "I don't know if it's a record-book bear,'' area wildlife biologist Rick Sinnott said, "but it's a huge bear. It would have been a big bear on Kodiak.'' Kodiak and the nearby Alaska Peninsula are home to the biggest brown/grizzly bears in North America. Bears of Kodiak size are sometimes seen in the Anchorage area -- Farley radio-collared one above Eagle River several years ago -- but they are rare. To shoot such a bear, legally, in one's backyard is unheard of. Fish and Game biologists have never encountered a hunt like this before, a hunt in which a man used his home as a blind from which to shoot a bear he let come almost within spitting distance. At that range, all it took was one shot from a powerful, .45-70-caliber rifle to put the bear down. "For a brief second, he gave me that perfect shot,'' said Sorensen, an experienced hunter. "So I shot him in the first vertebrae of the neck. He went down and never moved. I've never seen an animal die so immediately.'' A .45-70 rifles pushes a bullet almost as big around as your thumb. When a soft-point bullet like that hits bone at a distance of 20 feet, it flattens with the impact of a giant fist. "I'm surprised it didn't decapitate the bear,'' Sinnott said. Sorensen said he wanted a shot that would ensure the bear couldn't run off into a neighbor's yard. "I think he did the responsible thing,'' Sinnott added. ADVERTISEMENT Everyone agrees having a wounded grizzly running around in Chugiak, or any other Anchorage suburb, would be a bad thing. The city has already endured a summer of scary bear encounters. Two people were badly mauled by healthy grizzlies, something that had never before happened here. And city officials are now contemplating what steps might be taken to mitigate future bear problems in Anchorage. Changing state hunting rules to allow some bear hunting in and around the city has been suggested. Amid this discussion, hardly anyone noticed that there is an area where such hunting is already legal. Sorensen's home just happens to sit in the middle of it. He lives on a two-acre lot along a road that dead ends near upper Peters Creeks about 1,200 feet above Chugiak. To the east is Chugach State Park, where there is now a small, limited, drawing-permit hunt for grizzly bears. To the west is the Fort Richardson Military Reservation and Birchwood Management Area, where grizzly hunting is banned -- as it is to the north in the Eklutna Management Area and to the south in the Eagle River Management area. Between these closed areas, runs a thin strip of land in state Game Management Unit 14C that was never closed to grizzly hunting. State wildlife regulations, which reference the hundreds of thousands of acres closed to hunting in and around Anchorage and its suburbs, catalog this area as part of the "remainder of Unit 14C." In the "remainder of Unit 14C,'' grizzly hunting is open from Sept. 1 to May 31 with a limit of one bear every four years. Most of the "remainder of Unit 14C" is far from civilization near Lake George and the Knik Glacier over the mountains to the east. That is a remote corner of land beyond the wilderness of Chugach State Park far from Anchorage. Every few years, Sinnott said, a grizzly is shot there. Never before had the biologist heard of a grizzly shot in the thin finger of land along Knik Arm that also falls in the "remainder of Unit 14C.'' "I knew I was in a very unique area,'' Sorensen said "It's one of these bureaucratic cracks,'' Sinnott said. Over the years, the biologist said, the Birchwood Management Area was created between the obvious demarcation points of the Glenn Highway and Knik Arm. Then came the creation of Chugach State Park, which was another management area. Left between was that thin, remnant strip of Unit 14C. Almost all of the land in the strip is privately owned, with the exception of a couple, small municipal parks closed to the discharge of firearms. "An occasional moose (is) shot on private property in there,'' Sinnott said, "(but) I can't remember ever having a brown bear shot.'' Bears, though, are regular visitors. Farley has documented plenty of radio-collared grizzlies moving along Peters Creek. In the 19 years Sorensen has lived in the area since moving north from Colorado, he has seen many bears. "I see a lot of black bears around here, but it's rare for me to see a grizzly,'' Sorensen said. He never before shot any either. Then, a couple years ago, a massive grizzly started making occasional visits to Sorensen's property, and he started thinking about the bear. "He was enormous,'' Sorensen said, "and I always said I wanted one big grizzly bear. I passed up quite a few over the years. This one was a monster.'' Sorensen had shot black bears back in Colorado, but only one bear -- another black bear -- in Alaska. That was a large, berry-eating bear from the Mulchatna River drainage the hunter killed for food. "That was one tender and delicious bear," Sorensen said. "I rendered the fat, and it made the most amazing cinnamon rolls.'' That was years back. Sorensen hadn't shot a bear since, until he started thinking about killing this grizzly. So it might live on forever as a trophy in his home. "He'd been coming around every once in a while, very, very briefly," Sorensen said. "Then, this fall, he came around five or six times.'' Or at least there were five or six occasions on which Sorensen saw the bear. There were many nights when the family dogs started barking, Sorensen said. He suspects that on some of those nights, the bear was in the area. "He was very sly, very secretive,'' the man said, though by no means timid. "He wasn't aggressive,'' Sorensen said, "but I didn't challenge him either.'' Farley estimates the bear was 15 to 18 years old. The only way bears survive to that age, he added, is if they avoid people. Aggressive bears in the Anchorage area tend to get shot in defense of life and property or killed by authorities. The defense of life and property law allows anyone to kill a bear to protect him or herself, but the shooter must then skin the bear and turn the hide and skull over to the state. That arduous requirement makes most people avoid so-called DLP shootings at all costs. As someone who shot a bear in a legal hunt, however, Sorensen is entitled to keep the hide and have it mounted, which he intends to do. He started thinking about that possibility this summer. When the bear season opened Sept. 1, he was ready with a bear hunting tag. Several times over the course of the month, Sorensen said, he saw this big, old bear moving along or through his yard. Always, though, it was in the bad light of early morning or oncoming night. "Every time he came around, I had a shot,'' Sorensen said, but the hunter wanted a perfect shot -- a shot at an ideal angle and from such close range that the bear would die instantly. The shot came "right at dark'' on the evening of Sept. 26. "I was right at the back door,'' Sorensen said. The bear was those 22 feet away in the yard, and in a blink of an eye, the hunt was over. "For ease and convenience,'' Sorensen said, this was the perfect hunt. But as a man who knows the sweat and energy normally required for an Alaska hunt, he felt a touch of guilt. "I felt a little badly about it actually,'' Sorensen said. So along with keeping the bear's hide for a trophy, he tried to eat it, though the meat of grizzly bears tends to be so rancid that even most aboriginal inhabitants of Alaska avoided eating the animals. "He was incredibly fat,'' Sorensen said. "He didn't smell too bad. Not pleasant, but OK. I tried to eat him. I always said I'd try.'' The taste was awful. He couldn't do it. He has no plans to shoot another grizzly. |
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after .44 mag hotloads ya got .454, .460, .480, and .500 |
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While Black bears can and do come in a variety of colors black, brown, even a bluish white in the polar variety.. they are not refered to as "brown bears). |
A "brown bear" and a "black bear" are the same thing.
i think there must be some huge difference in terminology between washington and alaska. |
A brown bear and a black bear are most definitely NOT the same thing. 9dreizig sums it up pretty well. "Brown" is normally a grizzly or some variant thereof and "black" are the much smaller, more common bears that still roam around the Sierra Nevada of California (it's interesting to note that although the grizzly is a symbol of CA and is on the state flag, grizzly bears haven't existed in CA in almost 100 years because people hunted them to extinction here).
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Grizzlies need to be re-introduced into California as soon as possible, and in as near as possible to their previous numbers. That would fix a lot of things down there...
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You're right about that!
They can start with downtown San Fran. :) I'd pay for a front row seat to that one. |
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Wayne C. |
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I love it when people without specialist knowledge state what is or isn't true.:rolleyes: First, let us clear up the bit about bears in NA. There are three species with a couple of subspecies. The common names are often local and have little to do with the actual genetic diffireniated species that consists of: Brown Bear (Ursus arctos), the Grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos horribilis), also known as the Silvertip Bear, is a subspecies of that lives in the uplands of western North America, the American Black Bear (Ursus americanus) is the most common bear species native to North America, it lives throughout much of the continent,and the Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) native to the Arctic Seas and Arctic Circle regions. Black bears can come in a bewildering variety of shades and hues. From white (albino) to dappled, to brown (in every shade), to cinnimon, very gray and into pure black. All are the same species regardless of shade. Brown bears can also show a range of colors although with less variation than Black Bears. There is also a Brown and Polar Bear hybrid that has been recently identified. Although Black Bears can grow quite large, they are much less agressive than Brown Bears and are not built nearly as strong and tough. Black Bears are skilled tree climbers. Brown Bears are famous for their agressiveness and power. They typically grow much larger than Black Bears and cannot climb trees. There is an enormous difference in self defense between the two. Please note that when we speak of self defense against a Brown Bear (Ursus arctos) this distinction between hunting and self defense is critical. Elephants have been successfully hunted with a .22 long rifle cartridge. Brown bears have been successfully hunted with a .44 Magnum. Both are not optimum for self defense against an elephant or a Brown Bear. I do not have the time to look up the latest stats from Alaska, but last time I checked no successful self defense has been accomplished with a .44 Magnum in Alsaka against a Brown Bear. Now you may understand why we should use sharply defines terms like scientific names foe animals and keeping track of subject matter (hunting vs. self defense). Knowledge is powerful. Uninformed opinion is just so much static.SmileWavy |
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