Responded to a post discussing bullshit about the supermoon using the word “lunacy.”
Hmm, it looks like he was responding to a post about lead paint. It’s all very tenuous !
but i’m not going to worry about it !
That’s just plumb wrong.
lSWYDT
Tourists keep poking and poking and poking bear… until it has enough (yahoo.com)
The headline is inaccurate. I didn’t see any poking until the end. But they were getting foolishly close.
‘Dude! Don’t touch the bear! Are you f_____g kidding me, man?’
Yes but it was moon-adjacent. 
That’s more like it !
Stupid bear, I expected at a minimum some light mauling. Jeez, my sister’s dog Petey (RIP) was more vicious than that bear, he bit no fewer than 50% of my nieces/nephews over the years.
He should try that with a brown bear. Not that it’s smart with a black bear, but at least with them, they’re a little more “leave me alone, and I probably won’t maul you.” Grizzlies are infuriated by your very presence, if it thinks you’re encroaching on its space / territory.
An adult brown bear would have cleared that bank post haste.
Man, I can understand the idiots who get up close and personal with bison, or elk… They’re still idiots, but there’s at least some thought process that goes into “herbivore = not dangerous” (a flawed thought process, but a thought process). But a friggin’ bear!? I mean, like, that’s the type exemplar of “dangerous animal, stay away”. Everyone knows bears are dangerous!
Except Ranger Smith.
true, but I - consistently - get “more trouser per dollar” than a short guy.
AND …
tall people have less problems with smelly feet than short persons
TBF, black bears aren’t really dangerous. If there’s a wandering black bear and a wandering dog in your neighborhood, you’re about 100x as likely to be attacked by the dog. Of course, a black bear is about 5x the size of a Rottweiler, so it’s best to keep your distance.
I am of the same size - and the fact that I mostly have problems bumping my head into things, tells you probably a lot about my anatomy.
I applaud you, well-hung sir, gentleman, scholar!
You say that, but they have killed six people in the 2020’s alone. Relative to the population of black bears and their frequent proximity to humans that is definitely very, very low. But nonetheless as you say I wouldn’t be too casual with them. If they decide to kill you, they absolutely can.
I become less convinced every year that there’s anything at all that everyone knows.
Not usually – if you leave them the hell alone.
Years ago, I was in a conversation with somebody who kept beehives, and who found a bear (black bear, that’s what we get around here when we get bears at all) getting into his beehives.
He made a loud fuss and the bear ran off. So far, so good. Making a loud fuss at a black bear will often get them to do that.
He then, according to what he was telling me, grabbed an ordinary sort of hunting knife (meant for dressing out deer, and so on) and went after the bear. Which, luckily though not surprisingly, got away from him.
I said to him, “What were you going to do if you caught it?” to which it didn’t seem to me that he had any sort of good answer. – this was quite a few years ago, and I suspect that he thought he was going to impress a woman he’d just met at a party with how tough he was. He impressed me, all right – with how dimwitted he was. (It’s possible of course that he was just lying, and thought that I’d be dimwitted enough to be impressed; which is also not an attitude that I’d have been favorably impressed by.)
This is true. Lots of black bears around, even in suburban areas, and few attacks. But I’m not going to try to pet one. (Unless my wife lets me get one, but she won’t.)
Up in (black) bear country, I walked out of the house, walked past a tree in the yard and saw a couple of bear cubs climbing up it. I thought two things:
- Awwww, that’s adorable!
- I’m going inside now.
Black bears are enormously dangerous in terms of the harm they’re capable of. They’re just not hyper-aggressive and territorial in the way brown bears are.
But if by that you mean that a black bear wandering by your campsite is not a cause for panic or alarm, yeah.
Granted, there are many (MANY) more dogs in the US than bears, but dogs kill 30 - 50 people per year in the United States.