In the spirit of our “bear” threads, here’s some interesting reading I came across on Wikipedia which has a list of fatal bear attacks in North America. Since it’s hunting season and people are out there camping/hiking and enjoying the fall weather, make sure to carry and stay alert. Bear attacks aren’t as rare as the tree huggers want you to believe they are. A lot of these happened to experienced hunters and hikers.

List of fatal bear attacks in North America - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Ephesians 6 (Armor of God)

The 2001 killing of the lady at home in Mora, NM stands out in my mind.
You often hear about folks invading the Bears' space, etc. and its usually true!
But this lady was home. The bear was apparently attracted by the smell
of her home cooking.

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

That's looped me in a time or two too. You should smell my Ex's fried chicken.

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Possum—The other white meat!

Can’t make this stuff up. There’s a 2005 black bear attack in Ontario where the wife was killed and the husband was seriously injured by trying to protect her with a Swiss Army knife. Could you try and visualize how that one played out?

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Ephesians 6 (Armor of God)

Remember that Wikipedia has no verifying. I know of attacks not listed and some of those listed shouldn't be. Just take it with a (big) grain of salt.

But, it IS interesting reading!

The little boy who was dragged out of his tent in Utah back in 2007 was a story that rocked our state for quite a while. The listed report states:

Samuel Ives, 11, was grabbed from a family tent in American Fork Canyon, and mauled. State wildlife officials killed the bear, which had entered the campsite the night before. Ives' family sued the U.S. Forest Service because there was no warning about the bear's presence. A judge awarded the family $1.95 million. It was the first known fatal black bear attack in Utah.

Okay, in the words of Paul Harvey, "And now, the rest of the story..."

The reason the family won the lawsuit is that the Forest Service was aware of the bear's presence. It was a problem bear and had been frequenting the campgrounds, but the USFS failed to post even a minimal amount of warning signs.

But, here's the part you don't hear about. The little boy's parents, who were sleeping in the same tent with him, had been partying pretty heavily around the campfire and were so drunk that night that they barely woke up when they heard the little guy screaming. And then, by the time they became somewhat coherent as to what was going on, the boy was dead.

If the folks hadn't been drunk, 1) they would've, first off, probably heard the bear rifling through the trash in the campground, 2) they would've definitely heard the bear come ripping through the tent, and 3) they would've had the presence of mind to defend their little boy with a handgun or rifle which, by the way, almost every Utahan has close at hand when in the outdoors.

Instead, both Mom and Dad were in a drunken stupor and let their son get killed. Just recalling the whole incident makes me mad enough to "chew nails and spit rust!"

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Pack light and cinch tight.

As a little boy, we would tent camp at Yosemite (in the 50's and early 60's). Back when the NPS didn't do much to control bears. Well, these were not well planned-out trips, so we would often get campgrounds 4 or 11. Both campgrounds were right on the way to the dump. We older boys (2 out of 3 of us) would sleep outside and the little brat would sleep inside. Several times my parents woke up to find bear tracks between our sleeping bags.

Several got in shots with rifles, but the bear killed them before it died..

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

<--This must have been the look on your faces. That's pretty scary.

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Ephesians 6 (Armor of God)

I like bear accounts. One of my favorites was in, "Outdoor Life" (?) or, "Sports Afield" some years ago. An angler stabbed a bear that went for him in midstream. He was successful, and searchers later found 8-9 human bodies that that bear had stashed nearby in an apparent food cache.

I'm quite sure that no file has all attacks listed. Nor is the official shark attack file probably complete. Various factors influence whether an incident gets officially acknowledged, if word even reaches those who maintain such files.

My folks,sisters and I went to Yellowstone in '64.The first night camping a bear dropped by and banged into our tent a few times.I slept through it.Mom didnt.We stayed in a motel for the rest of the trip

The first time we went there we had a pickup camper.
They gave us bear info pamphlets at the gate.
We went on up a ways to a campground which we were told wasn't completely
Full.
Hadn't been there long when two couples with a Popup tent type trailer pulled in next door.
One of the guys asked me about the bear situation. I told him we had only been there about an hour so didn't really know.
Then he told that the night before last they were sleeping in their camper.
There was a rip and a bear came in. He ripped the door off their icebox and just snacked for a while.
Then he left. They just laid there petrified the long time.
The next night they rented a cabin. A ranger told them this was a relatively bear free site.
Didn't see or hear any, so I guess it was.

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

This one(Elora Petrasek, 6, female)on the list is real.
Happened about 5 miles from my home.

Outdoors, in the wilds or camping in your back yard in the suburbs expect the unexpected. Bears can be very quiet. You don't know they are there unless you see tracks. Or your bird feeder was attacked.
Never assume that there are no bears in your area. It's better to be on the lookout for bears anyway we just never know.

Here is an interesting tidbit:

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No good deed goes unpunished.

Numbers don't mean ****.. if you're number one!

And this topic is about those who DID encounter bear violence. The bear huggers try to minimize that, but there are more incidents every year.

Some is due to an overpopulation of bears in some areas and some to more naïve people hiking or camping in bear country. And some have built homes in areas where they're more likely to find bears. Or cougars.

I dislike these statistics that "prove" that you're not in danger from sharks or bears, etc. For one thing, they encompass the population as a whole, most of whom don't live where they may encounter dangerous animals, other than snakes or dogs. Or bees, wasps, spiders, etc.

shoot em shoot em thats what we would do if one was takin our kid

Of course since MOST people live nowhere near a wild bear these stats are true. Then again, ya know what they say about statistics.

I'm thinkin' that most of the 90,000X more likely to be shot, stabbed, or beaten to death folks that you mention live in or near the South Side of Chicago NOT in Talkeetna, Alaska.

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In dog years I'm dead.

Right after I graduated, there was a sighting on Grizzly Island in the east SF Bay area (near Fairfield). I've seen pictures of a large black bear walking on the beach at the south end of Banks Lake in Central Washington.

"Several got in shots with rifles, but the bear killed them before it died.. "

I have a buddy who works for Canadian Forest Service. He told me that many of their bear victims are found carrying a SLUNG rifle with a loaded chamber!

I wasn't the victim of a bear attack but one sure had me puckered up for a few minutes. We were camping at Lake Isabel in Colorado. There were five of us. The three ladies were in a little RV and my friend and me were in a tent.

He was a OHP Lt. and had brought his service weapon, a 357. We were on cots and shortly after we got settled in you could hear the distant garbage can lids coming off. They came getting closer and louder and then ours came off. I had already asked him if he had his gun and the reply was, It is in the RV.

My cot was almost touching the tent wall and suddenly I could feel movement of the wall as he sniffed down the side of the tent. Evidently we were not the kind of garbage the bear was looking for and it went on it's way. That was a relief for sure. The next day we were looking around and just across the road was a well worn trail through the brush going up this steep hill. We relocated and had no more tense moments..

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Mighty 90's,Trying 4 a 100!

My cousins had a cabin near Atlanta, Michigan in the boondocks. One night a bear came to visit and was real interested in clothing on the clothesline and was really attracted to my cousin, Audrey's panties and tore them to shreds. All this took place as their friends were watching from their truck camper parked outside terrified as they had no gun.
The panties got hung on the cabin wall along with the broken arrow my cousin shot me in the head with but another story.
Fortunately those bears never attacked anyone but they did do enough damage around the cabins up there. I saw a few while there myself but fortunately too they were as glad to get away from me as I was them.

With all due respect, that is a story I am going to be very skeptical about unless I'd see unimpeachable sources. Over the years I've read most major works on bear attacks, including those dedicated to portraying bears as bloodthirsty monsters, and a case like that would have become exhibit 1. Serial predation of humans, like it's known from lions and especially tigers (I highly recommend Jim Corbett's book on his hunts for man-eaters), has simply never been documented for bears.

For anyone who is interested in the topic, a couple of book recommendations:
Larry Mueller's "Bear Attacks of the Century" will probably appeal to you most; it focusses on hunters, mostly in Alaska, and basically all incidents involve guns; in fact he's been criticized by nature types for not even talking about bear spray.
Now Mueller's is my favorite, but I do think bear spray has its place, and a good supplement that's also very well-written is Scott McMillion's "Mark of the Grizzly", which includes a lot of the famous national park campground and hiker attacks that didn't involve guns, and also discusses spray in a factual manner.

Really interesting discussion and stories. Marking it!

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Brad

A couple you might like to read are Steve Herreros "Bear Attacks: Causes and Avoidance", a more readable version of his doctoral research on bear attacks and the paper he published on bear spray published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. The latter is peer reviewed (commented on and edited by at least 3 other scientists in the field) and follows the format for a scientific journal article==might be a little hard for the layman to follow but well worth the effort.

Imagine the size of the list if it included survived attacks.

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Why, I aughta.....

I have never been in on a bear attack, but I was at the scene of the aftermath of one. A guest "hunter" (I'm sure he read lots of magazines) was in a deer blind pre-dawn. In the darkness he saw a bear not far from him. As it approached, very deliberately, he remembered the many stories from other guys that read lots of magazines.
Fearing for his life, he fired twice and the bear fell still. At 10 am I drove up in the jeep to pick up the guest hunter and his kill, and in the clear light of the Texas morning, I saw a half ton of black angus "bear", just across the fence line from our ranch. It was a costly encounter for our "guest hunter", to say the least.
Never saw that fellow around the campfire again...funny that...

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Halfway and one more step

I think I have Herrero's book. I recall reading it. Pretty good.

Herrero's book is really the gold standard for a scientific inquiery into bear attacks. I've still got a first edition from back in the 1980s somewhere that got me started on the topic. It's especially good in that he deals separately with grizzlies and black bears and the different issues and recommended strategies. I've been meaning to get a copy of the updated edition. Herrero still pops up on TV programs on bear attacks.

I worked for Gov. Tom Bolack on a few hunting and fishing expeditions. He went to northern India as I recall on a contracted Tiger hunt to kill one that had taken a few laborers.
We took a croc in north queensland, and buffalo, along with some fish that were all placed in his museum in Farmington at the B SQUARE ranch. He liked killing killers. He had a Kodiak and a Polar at the museum too. He associated with Corbett.
Bolack Museum of Fish and Wildlife - Four Corners Region Geotourism Mapguide

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Halfway and one more step

I think I have a copy of the pepper spray article either here at home or at the office. If I can figure out how to post it, I will.

Bear Bio
When was this. I grew up in Rockville about 15 miles from Grizzly Island. I duck hunted Grizzly Island in the 70's. I never heard of this sighting. That seems like an unlikely place to see a bear as it is all marshland just off of Suisun Bay. That being said there was a black bear that came into the rural area between Rockville Corners and Cordelia across the street from Solano Community College in the 80's. My father told me all about it and saved the newspaper clippings about it. I recall reading in a sporting magazine that a 500 plus pound bear was killed not too far from Napa in the 80's also. There was a lady geologist doing field work for USGS outside Fairbanks Alaska that lost both arms to a Black Bear that was trying to make a meal of her until the helicopter returned and scared the bear away.

The habitat was the strange part of it. Grizzlies are open country bears (or were, until man drove them into the thicker stuff) but black bears are forest animals. we figured it had to have either come west from the Sierras (across farmland and sloughs) or up from the Monterey area. Either way, at least 200 miles of open, populated country. We had several "translocated" nears come back from almost 300 miles away in SoCal.

I am NOT afraid of dieing.
The thought of a bear feeding on me while I was alive and unarmed just pisses me off.
Blessings

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TEXAS, by GOD

I know. DEATH does not scare me but the process can be kinda messy!

Or to rephrase it one more way (not my quote):
I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be around when it happens.

One of the fatal black bear attacks happened close to where I live. It is believed the victim fired through a camper door trying to keep the bear out. The bear tore the door open, killed the man, and ate him. I saw the travel trailer afterwards ant it was a bloody mess.

Does this qualify?

Naked man attacks NJ Transit driver, tries to board bus in Irvington | NJ.com

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Some people say that pepper spray and bells worn on clothes help to prevent bear attacks.

It is also important to be able to tell the difference between black bear droppings and grizzly bear droppings.

Black bear droppings are usually smaller than grizzly bear droppings, and contain lots of berry seeds.

Grizzly bear droppings will sometimes contain bells and smell like pepper.

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Buy American
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And believe it or not, there've been people who sprayed the bear spray on themselves and their kids like mosquito repellent, as well as on their tent. Ironically, in its inert state the pepper taste apparently is rather appealing to bears.
And on a totally serious note, if you don't mind watching a guy die, look at this video starting at 4:20. It shows the bear which is pretty single-mindedly mauling its victim responding to being hit with the pepper spray:

Bears Gone Wild - YouTube

The best books on this subject are a set written by Gary James Shelton.

Some recommendations mirror Herrero's, but Shelton wrote first (although there is some temporal overlap) and actually lives with bears 24/7

Well,

I've had a run in or two with a few bears....

Jest glad I didn't make the 'List'


After my last encounter,
I built this lit'l take-down in 45-70....
Short & handy for those up close kinda deals.
Loaded stout with some serious Barnes bullets.


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"IN GOD WE TRUST"

My parents took me to Yellowstone in the 1950's. We slept in a cabin but I slept with one eye open and heard noises. The next morning we woke up and I saw a bear sleeping in the convertible top of a new 1952-53 Ford. His weight had it sagged it down to the seats but he apparently thought it was just fine.

Everyone's an expert until they're bear poop.

About 1990 or so, we went hunting out of Thermopolis, WY. Made a side trip through Yellowstone, with a buddy and his son. First we tent camped in the Park. Wife looked at the bear restrictions and made me sneak a shotgun into the tent (we brought the shotgun 'cuz she was our camp cook for a week). Then we cruised into Cody. On the way, we stopped at a couple of NF campsites. All had grizzly warnings posted and special food regs. We hit Cody and the first thing we see is a headline screaming: "Elk hunters shoot grizzly in tent!" (the by-line is Cody, of course). Then we see another story where two hunters abandoned camp 'cuz of grizzlies destroying everything. While eating, my buddy keeps commenting on the wall art (Elvis on velvet type art). He looks at me and points out the window while my wife is looking at the "art". I looked out the window and, stopped at the light, is a Forest Service truck hauling a trailer with a bear in it.

We get to camp and, at that time, we are too far east for grizzlies. The second day, I shoot a 4x4 buck and cross the canyon to it. On the way, I walk into a herd of elk and find the biggest set of droppings I've ever seen. Also, a porcupine, all gutted and the cavity literally licked clean. After field dressing the buck, I hiked down and flagged down the wrangler who packed our game out. I said "You must have the BIGGEST
black bears here!". He asked why and said "No, we have two sow grizzlies on the ranch. We haven't said anything to Game and Fish yet".

Didn't tell my wife until we were well into Colorado on the way home!

My ol pard Nate Vance had a lit'l run in with a big bear at his camp
in that Thoroughfare country just out side the Park back in the 90s.

Maulings: More grizzlies feeling more stress ? High Country News


I had an ol sow with cubs come into our camp one nite an take a little meat....

I guess, she figger'd it was jest a trespass fee for us hunting her hunting grounds.


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"IN GOD WE TRUST"

Had almost the same experience in our deer camp, but it was a big ol' cinnamon boar with a head the size of a bushel basket. Black bear, though...not a grizzly.

One of the boys had skinned out a buck the first morning of the hunt, leaving the head and horns attached to the hide. We went to bed that night with the head, horns, and hide lying at the base of the meat pole, with the buck sacked up and hanging.

Around 2:00 a.m., I woke up from hearing something brush by our tent, snufflin' around. I figured it was a bear, but being the dumb guy that I am, I just reached out to make sure my aught-six was still there, then rolled over in my ol' canvas bedroll and went back to sleep.

The next morning, we found that something had been messing around the meat pole, but didn't touch the little buck that was hanging there in the meat sack. Instead, it dragged off the hide, with head and horns attached...along with the ol' boy's deer tag that was securely fastened to one of the horns.

Of course, he was pretty concerned about losing his tag because the wardens always set up a check point every year on the dirt road that led to the trailhead several miles from our deer camp.

When the rest of us got back to camp that noon for lunch, following the morning hunt, we looked up on the hill right above camp and saw this big old cinnamon-colored black bear sitting down, gnawing away at something.

Eventually, we were able to scare him off (bear season didn't open for three more weeks or we would've done more than just scare him off), and we found out that he had been chewing on the fat around the tail-end of the hide. The head and horns had gotten wedged between a little fork of oak trees, so the bear just figured he'd sit right there and "chew the fat"...literally.

The hunter retrieved his tag, and all was well, but he was sweating big time for a while there.

Like Dave said, I guess this ol' boar was just collecting his trespass fee, too.

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Pack light and cinch tight.

They do have sources listed and they do have mechanism to detect when a page is being changed too frequently such as in cases when someone is trying to put false information into a page, which then gets corrected, and then changed again, and then corrected, etc, etc, and will lock pages down until people cool off.

so not saying that Wikipedia is infallible but I would think that any given page - over a period of time - has a higher probability of being accurate than most any other randomly selected source. It is a bit of a catch-22 situation, for pages where one person or even a very small group are responsible (such as a news agency) for the content it is far easier for them all to be wrong or misguided or even bullied by one member into posting something that is inaccurate - whereas Wikipedia being open t millions upon millions of people even if only a few hundreds of them take the time to contribute is less likely to suffer from the biases or other inherent limitations of a small closed group deciding the content.

It's not a recent phnomenon either. In the late '20s or early '30s, my uncle and two other young guys had an old Ford (Model T or A, I don't know which) and went on vacation from Connecticut where we lived, to California. They didn't make it all the way; camped in Yellowstone, a bear broke into their car and ate all their food, Pretty well destroyed the interior of the car, too. They came limping home. Never did get to California in his entire life.