Up near Bella Coola, a group of school children and teachers out on an outing in the wilderness. While, thank God, no one got killed, several children and teachers from the group of 11 remain hospitalized, some in pretty bad shape. Some of the teachers deployed bear spray to no effect, and a couple actually wound up physically wrestling with the bear before it ran off. Brave, heroic people, risking their lives like that for the others in their party.
I have to look at this from a hunter's point of view, and a hunter who has spent a pretty fair amount of time in good bear country pursuing these beasts. And, well, in other remote places, in the backyards of potentially even more dangerous critters. First off, they have banned bear hunting up there, back in 2017. The population has, as a result, exploded. Human / bear encounters have better than doubled, maybe even tripled in eight short years. Yeah, they like to blame "climate change" and the supposedly resultant shift in food supplies, amongst a myriad of other things. From my perspective, one held in the hunting community, is that there is two very obvious changes that have taken place - the bears have no reason to fear people anymore, and there are a lot more of them. A recipe for disaster if there ever was one.
Beyond that, having hunted in country where we know these things are about (and similar animals), I've been in hunting camps where we don't even go take a leak without our rifles. They are simply with us all the time. Gathering firewood, whatever. It's fairly axiomatic among us that "bear spray" is largely ineffective against a seriously pissed off example. Stories abound of the can of bear spray being tossed when empty and hunters being forced to shoot instead.
This is a delicate situation for some. It shouldn't be. Why on Earth anyone would anyone even consider going into good bear country unarmed is beyond me. Unfortunately, it seems to offend some's sensibilities to even consider being armed. Especially around children, which I find entirely perplexing. I would think that is when we would most want to be armed. The whole thought process just puzzles me - we wouldn't let our children swim in the ocean without a lifeguard, would we?
If there had been a competent man (or woman) with a rifle, I believe things would have come out much differently. As we have it, people are seriously injured, recovering (hopefully) in the hospital. It didn't have to be this way.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/24/canada-grizzly-bear-attack-search