[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
I’ve always heard that if a bear attacks you, lie down and play dead. He’ll sniff at you a bit, then leave. Well, I say bugger that! If that’s true, and it sounds like an Urban Legend to me, but even if it’s NOT an Urban Legend, I’m running as fast as I can and freely admit I will likely die, because there is no way I’m going to just lie down if something like a bear attacks me.
Which reminds me of this joke: Two guys are out in the woods. One is a bit nervous about bears and asks his friend what they should do if they encountered one. The friend says, “We run.” The nervous guy says, “What, are you crazy? You can’t run faster than a bear.” The friend says, “I don’t have to run faster than the bear. I just have to run faster than you.”
Seriously, though, I have heard that bears have a difficult time running downhill, because their front legs being shorter slows them down, and so one should try to run downhill when fleeing a bear. Does anyone know if there’s any truth to this?
[/QUOTE]
I’m no bear expert but I have met one, once :D, and watch a lot of Animal Planet!
The general consensus is, bear-human encounters are complex, and different things drive different encounters. You have to also vary how you approach the situation based on what type of bear you are dealing with.
Black bears are by their nature timid. Black bears evolved in a world with packs of dire wolves, saber tooth tigers, and gigantic short-faced bears (believed to be the largest terrestrial mammalian predator of all time); against these threats black bears stood no chance. So black bears have evolved to more or less back away from confrontation, and to use their climbing ability to get out of trouble.
So in general yelling at a black bear or acting aggressively scares them off. Black bears recognize human aggression quite well and in most situations they will respond to it. Black bears approach humans for basically three reasons, one is because they are simply curious, the other is because they smell food (such as you might find at a campsite) and the other will be discussed in a second. When a black bear is approaching you for the above two reasons, acting aggressively will almost always scare the bear away.
If for some reason you find yourself close to a black bear, there are certain things you can do that will piss said bear off, how the bear responds is usually the same way they would respond to another bear doing said thing. If you see a bear eating your food, and you take it away, the bear may charge you or slap you. Being slapped by a black bear isn’t near so damaging as often perceived (it usually leaves welts but no cuts–black bear claws are adapted for digging into trees not for tearing flesh.) The “slap” is the way bears show their displeasure to other bears, and a way of telling them “hey, buzz off.” Them charging is a way to try and scare you away or intimidate you, it is usually not a genuine attack. Gorillas exhibit very similar behavior, it’s mostly bluster. That’s possibly what happened in this case. If a bear slaps or charges you, the best response is to get out of the way, if the bear shows any signs of coming after you, start acting very aggressive and throw things at the bear. If the bear is coming after you, don’t run, you can’t escape a bear that is actually chasing you, your best bet is to try and scare it off.
In either of the above cases, where a bear is charging you as a bluff or is slapping you to show irritation, playing dead is probably a bad response. Primarily because there are many better ways to diffuse the situation and if the bear isn’t bluffing or is genuinely attacking, playing dead can have disastrous consequences.
The third occasion a bear will have to approach a human is when the bear is stalking you as prey. Black bears have been observed doing this but it is exceptionally rare and every case of it happening has been in areas of the world where the bear had little to no human contact. It’s not entirely understood what makes black bears do this, but keep in mind there are over 700,000 black bears in the United States and in general predatory attacks by them have happened maybe 50 times in 100 years. It’s difficult to assess why a bear is approaching you. Are they stalking you? You can tell, sometimes, but an untrained eye probably can’t differentiate between a bear approaching you as prey and a bear cautiously approaching you out of curiosity or because it smells food on or around you. In any case, when a bear is stalking you your only chance is to aggressively drive it away. Playing dead is equivalent to suicide, a bear that views you as prey wants you on the ground so it can kill you and eat your corpse. Don’t help it out in that endeavor. Black bears can weigh up to 400 lbs. and are incredibly strong, way stronger than the strongest human. However, you don’t have to be able to kill a bear with your bare hands to live through a predatory encounter, if you wound or scare the bear it will often retreat, even if it is attacking you in a predatory fashion.
Most of the same rules apply to grizzly bear encounters. However there is one exception. Grizzly bears tend to attack defensively sometimes, which goes beyond the black bears “slapping” or “blustering” intended to display annoyance. A grizzly bear will attack defensively if it feels threatened, whereas a black bears first response when it feels threatened is almost always to run away. Grizzly bears are less timid, and will often respond to feeling threatened by eliminating the threat. If a grizzly is attacking you defensively because it feels threatened, playing dead will make it feel safe and it may leave you alone. Studies have shown this to work.
However, grizzly bears and other larger bears like the polar bear are also not unlikely to be stalking you as prey (while such attacks are extremely rare, this is primarily because grizzlies and polar bears have less contact with humans, not because they are behaviorally disposed to not stalking humans if hungry.) In that scenario, playing dead is again, suicide.
Since it’s very hard to tell the difference between a defensive and offensive attack, I’d probably never play dead. It may save my life if the bear is acting defensively, but it may make me easy prey if it is not. Grizzly bears are much larger than black bears, but they too can be driven off sometimes, although climbing a tree is also effective against them as they are poor climbers (but can be over 10 feet tall, so get high in the tree.)
My understanding is that while bears do have trouble running downhill, they are still faster than humans on any terrain.
And you are right, exact location will matter. Although I guess my point is that if the authorities in the area deem it a good idea to ‘keep a clean camp’ or however they described it, due to the local bear population it is probably in your best interest to do so. Those rules are not just to keep you safe, but to keep other visitors safe and the environment and local nature prestine and safe from you as well. Camping responsibly takes a lot of planning and knowledge to stay safe and leave no trace. More than most people think.