Plate Armor vs. Grizzly Attack

[Misery_Loves_Co]

Stranger on a Train, GomiBoy, you’re missing my point.

My point about refrigerators is that there’s a difference between what an animal or a human can do given leverage and time to apply it, versus the damage that an animal or human can do in a strike.

I do not doubt that a bear can rip apart a car, nor would if have difficulty prying a human out of a suit of armor. No contest, no objection, I AGREE.

I don’t agree that that’s a realistic phase of combat - I’m not going to try to wrestle a bear, and I’m not going just stand there and let a bear try to open my armor.

I’m going to move, I’m going to dodge, I’m going to maintain range, and I’m going to be swinging a very large peice of sharpened metal at him.

It seems that people’s mental image of the OP is of some idiot standing there while a bear takes pot-shots at him. If you’re in plate and allowing a bear to do that, then you will die and you deserve to because you’re a moron. That’s what Hurtubise was trying to do. What the “Knight vs Bear” scenario has that the twit with his “bearproof” suit doesn’t, is that the bearproof suit was designed to be a passive defence, and the wearer was not out to tangle with and kill the bear. NOT the scenario (as I imagine it) with K v B.

In the scenario I imagine, I see someone who’s actively interested in staying alive, which means staying out of range and relying on the armor in case something bad happens (which is the way armor is used, BTW), and actively trying to kill the bear. Plate Armor was incredibly effective in the day, yet I don’t believe even IT was designed to withstand a full-on, prepared shot from a Halberd, which would shatter bones and cause spalling on the inside of the metal, even if it didn’t manage to cut through. Remember, that’s from a hunk of steel shaped so that all the weight is transfered through a sharp edge, swung on a 8 foot shaft through an arc of at least 90 degrees). It ain’t a hatchet.

@GomiBoy

2. Charge at attacker, swiping once or twice, will attempt to knock a person down
3. Once the target is down, the bear will come in an maul the person on the ground, rolling them over and over and biting and pawing at the head and neck
4. This is generally where the attack ends, if the person is smart enough to play dead. But I would bet that a person in armor would be pretty messed up by this point, especially by the maul attack, as their armor would be dented

Now this is realistic. My problem comes between step 2 and 3. What if I maintain range, use terrain to help against charges, keep moving, and take shots where I can? What if I’m smart enough to fight so I don’t get knocked down? What if I fight like I’d fight anyone (or anything) that’s superior and deadly at infighting?

Grizzlies have been known to take .44 and .357 mag round to the skull several times without stopping them. I doubt your war pick would do as much penetration damage as a .357 or .44 mag.

Cite? I have serious difficulty that liquifying a bear’s brain would not stop it, which is what I’d expect a .357 or .44 that penetrated the skull to do. So I’d want a cite with details: point blank? head -on? Penetration at an angle (like it skimmed the outside of the skull?). Assuming that the foreign object enters the brain, I don’t think it matters if it was a bullet or a pick.

I have to ask - does anyone in this thread have any melee experience? Any experiece training or fighting with bladed/hafted weapons? Understand how range, speed, attack, and defense work in such? Understand of what armor is, how it’s made, how it’s used, what it’s designed to do? I mean, I know it’s a bear, I know it’s powerful, I know it’s heavy, and I know that it can charge. These do not make it invincible.

[GomiBoy]

@Misery Loves Co.

Stranger on a Train, GomiBoy, you’re missing my point.

I think I am just disagreeing with you. You couldn’t knock a fridge over with your hand without leverage; a bear could. Easily.

@Misery Loves Co.

Remember, that’s from a hunk of steel shaped so that all the weight is transfered through a sharp edge, swung on a 8 foot shaft through an arc of at least 90 degrees). It ain’t a hatchet.

Nope, it’s quite a deadly weapon that would do serious damage to a bear. I just doubt you’d be able to kill one before it was onto you. That’s what I am saying.

Lewis and Clark, during their expedition west along the Missisippi and then Yellowstone rivers, kept hearing stories from the various Indian tribes as they passed about ‘yellow’ bears that the party would be wise to steer clear of. Merriwether Lewis found one of these yellow bears and promptly shot it. He was either very lucky, or the bear was likely sick or injured already, for it died right away.

Later on the expedition, the party came across another yellow bear (likely a grizzly). It took every man in the party at that point (7 IIRC) shooting at the bear with their muskets (one or two got off two shots) before it went down. These were practiced and skilled hunters; I doubt they missed many shots. And Lewis barely escaped with his life, as the bear got within 2 or 3 feet of him on it’s final charge (it chased Lewis up a riverbank and through a thicket of willow trees while being shot by the rest of the party).

@Misery Loves Co.

Now this is realistic. My problem comes between step 2 and 3. What if I maintain range, use terrain to help against charges, keep moving, and take shots where I can? What if I’m smart enough to fight so I don’t get knocked down? What if I fight like I’d fight anyone (or anything) that’s superior and deadly at infighting?

Your problem and everyone else’s in that situation I think you’d be smart enough to try that, and possibly even fit enough - I think the point would be you couldn’t; the bear would close with you incredibly quickly. I would say you’d have one chance with your weapons before he was on you. Then you’d be screwed.

Of course, this is a highly unrealistic scenario; the bear would likely leave you the hell alone if you gave it half a chance; at most it would knock you down then leave. They are omnivores, and don’t really actually hunt very much or most breeds don’t (polar bears are excellent hunters, and do treat humans as just another food source and are quite deadly to humans). Grizzlies are excellent scavengers, but their diet (except at certain times of the year) is mostly root vegetables and berries and such. They like to eat meat when they can, but why risk hunting and fighting when you can just find a nice rotting carcass with your excellent nose?

@Misery Loves Co.

Cite? I have serious difficulty that liquifying a bear’s brain would not stop it, which is what I’d expect a .357 or .44 that penetrated the skull to do. So I’d want a cite with details: point blank? head -on? Penetration at an angle (like it skimmed the outside of the skull?). Assuming that the foreign object enters the brain, I don’t think it matters if it was a bullet or a pick.

I’ll see if I can find one, but I have seen first hand in my youth a bear that a hunter nailed after it was skinned out. Adult male grizzly, weighed in around 700lbs if I remember correctly (it was a long time ago). Friend’s dad shot it 5 times, twice in the head, from side and also the front, with a .30-06 rifle, from a range of between 200 and 50 feet (it was coming at him after the first two shots). Neither of the bullets to the head penetrated the skull; the shot to the heart is the one that took it down.

Have you ever seen a Grizzly skull? It’s like 2 inches of bone in most spots. If you got a lucky hit with your war spike, then yeah, you would pierce the brain and that would be it, but I wouldn’t count on it.

@Misery Loves Co.

I have to ask - does anyone in this thread have any melee experience? Any experiece training or fighting with bladed/hafted weapons? Understand how range, speed, attack, and defense work in such? Understand of what armor is, how it’s made, how it’s used, what it’s designed to do? I mean, I know it’s a bear, I know it’s powerful, I know it’s heavy, and I know that it can charge. These do not make it invincible.

Yes, I do; I was taught loads of hand to hand nastyness while I was in the military, and also have experience as an EMT dealing with various types of trauma, including severing of limbs and blunt force trauma from industrial accidents.

Knives cut, as do all blades and swords, and kill by bleeding or if you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending :)) by striking an internal organ. Unless you can lop off someone’s head or arm, they’re still gonna tag you on their way down if they have a mind to; same goes with a bear, although at a factor of several dozen I would think.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Misery Loves Co.

I don’t agree that that’s a realistic phase of combat - I’m not going to try to wrestle a bear, and I’m not going just stand there and let a bear try to open my armor.

I’m going to move, I’m going to dodge, I’m going to maintain range, and I’m going to be swinging a very large peice of sharpened metal at him.

This is what I visualize:

[ol]
[li]Armored man closes on bear with halberd.[/li][li]Bear stands ground.[/li][li]Armored man swings halberd. Fails to connect, or connects but does only superficial damage.[/li][li]Bear gets irritated. Swipes man with paw.[/li][li]Man falls down, stunned, and lets go of halberd. [/li][li]Man tries, awkwardly to get up.[/li][li]Bear swipes man again.[/li][li]Man tries to get up.[/li][li]Bear swipes man again.[/li][li]Bear stands on man, preventing man from moving.[/li][li]Bear grabs man’s arm/leg/helmet in teeth and bites down.[/li][li]Man screams in pain.[/li][li]Bear is curious about screaming, bites again.[/li][li]Man passes out.[/li][li]Bear pries apart suit at liesure, takes a bite, decides to eat man’s horse instead.[/li][/ol]

Once (if) a bear knocks you down, he’s not going to give you the chance to stand back up. If the bear is that close to you, he’ll be really nervous and will respond to any movement (which is why playing dead in that situation, at least with a black bear, is the smart move.) They’re smart, quick animals.

The bear’s skin and thick coat will also provide substantial protection. Hunters who use a large handgun find that a hollowpoint bullet just gets plugged with fur and skin instead of expanding. A glancing blow with a halberd (and yes, I’ve handled one) would probably do no damage at all, and it’s such an awkward weapon at close range that you’re not going to get a second stroke, despite all of the weaving and dodging you might try at, IMHO.

Cite? I have serious difficulty that liquifying a bear’s brain would not stop it, which is what I’d expect a .357 or .44 that penetrated the skull to do.

I don’t have a cite but I’ll confirm that opinion with second-hand anecdotal experience. :rolleyes: Handgun bear hunters use the heaviest bullet and the hottest load, but even then, the skull is so thick that a shot that hits the skull at an angle may just glance off. This is why Alaskan guides who carry a weapon against grizzlies carry a large caliber magnum rifle (like a 7mm Rem Mag) or a 12 guage shotgun with slugs. Tough suckers they are, and they can absorb a lot of punishment.

I have to ask - does anyone in this thread have any melee experience? Any experiece training or fighting with bladed/hafted weapons? Understand how range, speed, attack, and defense work in such? Understand of what armor is, how it’s made, how it’s used, what it’s designed to do? I mean, I know it’s a bear, I know it’s powerful, I know it’s heavy, and I know that it can charge. These do not make it invincible.

Yes, I do. Martial arts and (a little) edged weapon training. I’ve not worn armor (well, ballistic body armor but not a plate suit) but I’ve seen it up close. A bear charging at you at 40mph is going to give you, maybe, one shot with a melee weapon. Invincible? No. Quick, tough, and ferocious (if cornered and attacked)? Yes.

But not nearly as dangerous as the feared bunny rabbit.

Strange

[GomiBoy]

@Stranger On A Train

This is why Alaskan guides who carry a weapon against grizzlies carry a large caliber magnum rifle (like a 7mm Rem Mag) or a 12 guage shotgun with slugs. Tough suckers they are, and they can absorb a lot of punishment.

The guides I went fishing with in Alaska carried 10 gauge semi-auto 5-shot shotguns. The first shell was a noisemaker, the second was rocksalt, the next three were slugs. Idea being, if you can’t scare it off with a noisemaker and the rock salt, the next three slugs would be enough to take down a charging rhino…

But not nearly as dangerous as the feared bunny rabbit.

Nothing is more feared… then the Nasty Sharp Pointy Teeth!

[Misery_Loves_Co]

@GomiBear

I think I am just disagreeing with you. You couldn’t knock a fridge over with your hand without leverage; a bear could. Easily.

Let go of the fridge! My point wasn’t about knocking over fridges! My point was: Assume a task that is possible for a human, given leverage. That is analagous to a task that a bear is capable of, with leverage. That same task is not possible without that leverage, within the bounds of the analogy. In short: The bear can tear off the door, but not without bracing and leveraging it (even if that leverage is against itself as with a tearing motion). It cannot merely swipe the car door off its hinges. My point was again to redirect what plate armor is supposed to protect against: Impact and slashes, penetration (to a degree), etc.

The scenarios with people shooting bears don’t impress me much - I’m crystal on the fact that a bear can survive getting shot with small bits of lead, and while Guns are Great, it is clear to see why the mass of a bear allows it to absorb a huge amount of punishment from small-arms, particularly ball-and-powder which are nowhere near as powerful as modern arms. So in response to all the annecdotes about bears getting shot, OK. NBD. As humans, we put a lot of stock in the fact that .5" of lead can easily pierce our thin skin and cause shock-damage to our relatively small frame and drop us. I have no trouble believing that such damage is more easily absorbed by a bear’s skin and fat. But as you mention, blades cause death by blood loss. What allows more/faster blood loss? A .68" hole? or a gaping, massive laceration? You dismissed it but I am talking about removing limbs, not trying to stick a piece of metal through its chest wall and into it’s heart. People use similar weapons to hack through whale skin and blubber, with dramatic efficiency.

Have you ever seen a Grizzly skull? It’s like 2 inches of bone in most spots. If you got a lucky hit with your war spike, then yeah, you would pierce the brain and that would be it, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Fair 'nuff - 2" of solid bone does pose a significant barrier, and I’m sure a pick’d have some severe difficulty getting through that, as would about anything short of a ballista (thinking medieval, here). Ok, so if it comes to infighting, the game’s over, period.

Yes, I do; I was taught loads of hand to hand nastyness while I was in the military, and also have experience as an EMT dealing with various types of trauma, including severing of limbs and blunt force trauma from industrial accidents.

Hand to hand is not the same. I’ve done both (a bit), and they’re different games. The games I fight are touch=death, so you mentally rely on NO armor. It’s all range. But on the other hand, armor’s been a hobby of mine for ages, so I know a bit about it - theory, construction, and application.

Knives cut, as do all blades and swords, and kill by bleeding or if you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending ) by striking an internal organ. Unless you can lop off someone’s head or arm, they’re still gonna tag you on their way down if they have a mind to; same goes with a bear, although at a factor of several dozen I would think.

Well, just because you’ve tagged someone doesn’t mean they get the chance to tag you on the way down. Double-kill is still a kill, so you make sure you’re guarding until they /are/ down and out. Fighting a ranged fight w/ weapons is not the same as a gun fight, it’s not the same as a wrestling match, it’s not the same as hand to hand. And methodes appropriate to the first three will get you killed in a ranged fight.

Now on to Strange’s post:
I’ll skip past the step-by-step, which is good for choreography, particularly with a desired outcome

A charge can be prevented by using terrain. A tree in the way makes it hard for a bear to charge you (no, not a sapling, imagine something nice and big). So will a rock. There’s also the option of moving to the side, rather than trying to back away. A dodge to the side while swinging at the legs is a better bet that trying to aim one good shot and hoping it’ll stop the charge and the bear.

I’ve addressed the small-caliber anecdotes above, so I’ll leave those alone.

A glancing blow with a halberd (and yes, I’ve handled one) would probably do no damage at all, and it’s such an awkward weapon at close range that you’re not going to get a second stroke, despite all of the weaving and dodging you might try at, IMHO.

How about a direct blow? How /good/ are you with one? have you trained with one? Training is different from handling one, so don’t be modest: if you’re an expert and this is an expert POV, let us know. If you’ve picked one up here and there, that’s not the same.

Again, a ranged fight is not just weaving and dodging. It’s about moving and maintaining range, which is a different game from dodging swings and ducking swipes so you can land punches and kicks to the body.

Yes, I do. Martial arts and (a little) edged weapon training. I’ve not worn armor (well, ballistic body armor but not a plate suit) but I’ve seen it up close. A bear charging at you at 40mph is going to give you, maybe, one shot with a melee weapon. Invincible? No. Quick, tough, and ferocious (if cornered and attacked)? Yes.

See above. Different fight, and balistic armor is not the same as plate. A bear can charge at 40mph, but a person is capable of moving, too, and that doesn’t just mean straight backwards.

As I said, I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m not saying that anyone could do it, I’m not even saying that the human has even odds. I’m just not convinced that it’s as cut-n-dry as you’ve all painted it.

But not nearly as dangerous as the feared bunny rabbit.

Well, if you’re going to bring a bunny rabbit into this, then the fight’s clearly over before it 's begun! Bears are one thing, but c’mon, against a bunny rabbit - the knight’s clearly toast. What did you mean by bringing it up, anyway! I do have to sleep tonight, y’know?

[GomiBoy]

OK, you’re mostly right, and I don’t want to go word for word, but I have a couple of points:

I’ll even leave the fridge alone!

Guns kill by massive tissue trauma due to shock; a ‘small little piece’ of metal does a huge amount of damage due to the speed at which it’s travelling. That’s why little tiny bullets drop people dead at long range - the internal shock is massive. You’re way off base if you think bladed weapons, even great huge ones like halbreds, do more damage than guns. If that was true, we’d still be using them as infantry weapons.

I still think you’d have problems getting such an unweildly weapon to bear on a bear (sorry about that), especially one moving quickly to stomp you flat. And all your jinkin’ and jivin’ to dodge around him wouldn’t do you much good either. Bears don’t choose to hunt usually, but that don’t mean they’re not good at it when the choose do, and I can guarantee you a deer or an elk is a hell of a lot quicker than you are.

[Misery_Loves_Co]

@GomiBoy

Guns kill by massive tissue trauma due to shock; a ‘small little piece’ of metal does a huge amount of damage due to the speed at which it’s travelling. That’s why little tiny bullets drop people dead at long range - the internal shock is massive.

Of course, of course. But that doesn’t seem to be the case w/ bears, so mass has something to do with the ability to absorb that shock, no? That’s my point. You’d have to scale up the bullet to bear-size, so say small artillery peice,to do the same shock damage to a bear that you’d do with a .45 ACP to a human. But if you open either a human or a bear up with a knife/blade/axe, they loose large amounts of blood,.

You’re way off base if you think bladed weapons, even great huge ones like halbreds, do more damage than guns. If that was true, we’d still be using them as infantry weapons.

Again, apples to oranges. Bullets pack the punch they need to to stop humans, guns are easy to shoot, they’re the perfect tool for the job. If it was some crazy world where human armies faught against bear armies (stupid, but go with me), we’d upscale our standard infantry weapons to 1-shot 1-kill standards for bears and retain the guns because they allow us to kill at a distance. Again, you can’t compare guns to polearms. They inflict different damage and are used in different ways.

I still think you’d have problems getting such an unweildly weapon to bear on a bear (sorry about that), especially one moving quickly to stomp you flat. And all your jinkin’ and jivin’ to dodge around him wouldn’t do you much good either. Bears don’t choose to hunt usually, but that don’t mean they’re not good at it when the choose do, and I can guarantee you a deer or an elk is a hell of a lot quicker than you are.

Well, because of that bear pun, I’m afraid we’ll have to take this out back. You’ve your choice of weapons - I assume you’ll be using a bear? I’ll forgo the armor/halberd combination in favor of stiletto and off-hand howitzer.

I disagree that a halberd or other poleaxe can be dismissed as an “unwieldy weapon” - in trained hands, weapons aren’t unwieldy, or they’re useless. “Jinkin’ and jivin’” just underscores how trivial you think that an aware human’s responsed could be. I know bears kill elk and deer, but they don’t catch them in flat-out rushes when the prey is aware. Only a small portion of their diet is red meat, and that is scavanged as well as “caught”. Also, deer and elk don’t fight back, which requires different reflexes than just getting the hell out of dodge. This is a fight, remember?

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Misery Loves Co.

A charge can be prevented by using terrain. A tree in the way makes it hard for a bear to charge you (no, not a sapling, imagine something nice and big). So will a rock. There’s also the option of moving to the side, rather than trying to back away. A dodge to the side while swinging at the legs is a better bet that trying to aim one good shot and hoping it’ll stop the charge and the bear.

A bear (if it decided to charge you) would probably just go right over a rock, and wouldn’t have much trouble going around a tree. They look slow and dumpy in the Disney videos, but when these suckers want to move, they go. When charging, they’re moving at almost 60 feet per second and are surprisingly agile. And remember, they aren’t standing up; they’re crouched down, moving low. The head is not the highest point in that stance; they’re basically just a big brown blur of speed. Not an easy target.

@Misery Loves Co.

How about a direct blow? How /good/ are you with one? have you trained with one? Training is different from handling one, so don’t be modest: if you’re an expert and this is an expert POV, let us know. If you’ve picked one up here and there, that’s not the same.

A direct blow from a pole-axe to the skull would no doubt cleave it in half; pole-axes were conceived (as you are probably aware) for the purpose of pentrating armor. But the fur acts like kind of a lubricant in preventing the edge to take a bite*, and if your blade comes down slightly off-angle to the skull or limb, it’ll probably just do a little shave.

No, I’m not an expert with the pole-axe, but I have trained a bit with the longstaff (bo) and I think I have a good feel for how slowly you can react with a long-handled weapon. If you get a good shot to the head the first time, you stand a good chance of killing the bear (though you still have a 500+ lb mass moving at you at 60 fps :eek: ) but if you miss…

@Misery Loves Co.

As I said, I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m not saying that anyone could do it, I’m not even saying that the human has even odds. I’m just not convinced that it’s as cut-n-dry as you’ve all painted it.

Oh, I wouldn’t say it is cut-and-dried hopless (my humorous envisioning aside) but I think Pinky would have to take the long odds against Ursa, even with armor and a halberd. It would take luck, and skill with the axe, to preservere.

Fortunately for me (wait for it) I, for one, welcome our new ursine overlords.

Stranger

• Which is probably the reason, or at least part of it, that humans have a thick coat of hair on their heads.

[Gary_Robson]

Two problems with the halberd (or any polearm) against the grizzly.

If you’re slashing with it, it has to go through a thick mat of fur. Thick hair is deucedly difficult to cut (as was discussed in the recent guillotine thread), so if your edged weapon makes it through, it will have lost a lot of its momentum. With a polearm, you’re unlikely to get a second swing.

If you’re stabbing, or holding steady to stop a charge, the first blow has to be fatal, or the bear will slash out, snap the handle, and move in on you.

As others pointed out, once you’re down, it’s all over. I recently visited a facility where they use captive grizzlies to test bearproof containers for food and trash. All it would take is hooking a claw in the joint between two pieces of plate, and that armor is coming apart. Those animals are incredibly strong.

In addition to the local grizzlies (a 500-pound bear in the Yellowstone area is considered really big), they have some Alaskan grizzlies, including a boar weighing over 1,000 pounds. A 200-pound bear is much stronger than a human. This monster is so far out of our league we’re not even in the same game.

Just to give you an idea of their speed and fighting skill, by the way, the director of the wolf reintroduction program in Yellowstone said he watched a single male grizzly take a fresh kill away from a pack of 24 (!) wolves. He just waded into the middle of the pack slashing and biting and they all ended up leaving the kill to him. If he’s quick enough to deal with a fight where he’s completely surrounded by wolves, then it’s going to be difficult for a single human to out-manouver him.

Oh, and as an aside to *pool, grizzlies don’t pounce.

[Gary_Robson]

Grrr. Should have previewed. Oh well, this gives me a chance to respond to Misery Loves Co.'s latest post.

I agree with almost everything you said, except the part about red meat being “only a small portion of their diet.” It depends on the time of year. When they’re out for protein, meat constitutes 30% to 70% of their diet. Most of it comes from kills taken away from other predators (wolves, coyotes, mountain lions…). They aren’t fast enough to take down an elk or a moose in an open field, but they’re definitely capable of killing one if they get it cornered.

[Chronos]

Misery Loves Co., I certainly agree with you that the human would be wise to maintain range. But I’m unsure how exactly he’s going to do so when on foot versus an opponent twice his speed. Add in that the human is encumbered by armor (yeah, I know, not much, but you’ll notice nobody wears armor at track meets) and is moving backwards (at least, if he’s still trying to fight), there’s no possible way that you’re going to keep yourself a polearm’s length away. If your knight is skilled with the polearm and keeps his nerve, he’s going to get in one shot. And if he’s very skilled, knows the bear’s vulnerabilities, and has a good, strong arm, he may even be able to decapitate the bear in that one shot. And he’d better hope he does, because if not:

The bear closes, and makes contact. Due to its shear mass, it doesn’t much matter what sort of contact it is; it’s very likely to knock the knight over. Immediately after knocking the knight over, it’s going to be on top of him. The knight can’t move any more, and depending on how strong his armor is (I don’t know enough to say), he might even be crushed. And once the knight isn’t moving any more, it wouldn’t be too tough for the bear to separate the knight’s helmeted head from his armored torso.

You meantion death by blood loss. Fair enough, blood loss will kill, and in fact, that’s the usual way in which blades do kill. But even a human can take minutes to bleed to death, and a bear has a lot more blood than a human. Meanwhile, it’ll take that bear a fraction of a second to knock you down (and incidentally, it’s going to at least succeed in that, even if it does die instantly in the process), and I would not count on it taking a minute to figure out which end of the knight is the head. You can content yourself with the bear bleeding to death, but I’d rather survive, personally.

[Misery_Loves_Co]

InvisibleWombat - again, fair 'nuff: I got my Bear-Diet info off a 5 minute websearch, and the sites downplayed the role of red meat, upplaying the role of fish and omni-fare. Point being is that bears aren’t the great northern hunters so much as the great northern fisherman, scavengers (or bullies ), and gatherers.

As others pointed out, once you’re down, it’s all over. I recently visited a facility where they use captive grizzlies to test bearproof containers for food and trash. All it would take is hooking a claw in the joint between two pieces of plate, and that armor is coming apart. Those animals are incredibly strong.

No contest. If you’re in a condition where the bear can get a claw under your armor, the fight is already over. Armor is proof (or help) against a swipe that would lacerate non-armored flesh, not proof against a can opener, or the bear tapdancing on yer skull, or any number of other scenarios that people have used to illustrate the awesome power of a bear.

As for a pack of wolves - I’m sure I could wade through and take food from a pack of chihuahuas, which I think is a comparable scenario. Wolves aren’t built to take down a bear - insufficient strength, insufficient equipment; speed doesn’t factor into it.

Which brings me back to the common speed argument: this is a bear, not a taekwondo master; I understand the 40 MPH charge, the lightning reflexes, the 12" adamantium claws, laser-eyes, etc :D. Flat out speed can be countered by maneuver. It’s how you win a fight at any level, from tanks to knife fights. Easiest defense is not to be there.

Stranger, in the other current bear thread you had no problem accepting that a person successfully kept a black bear away from them by using cover. What’s different in this scenario? Kodiaks and Grizzlys are bigger, definitely, but do they have some sort of special skill at getting around large trees and leaping over boulders?

And remember, they aren’t standing up; they’re crouched down, moving low. The head is not the highest point in that stance; they’re basically just a big brown blur of speed. Not an easy target.

Great, actually. Having the head lower and in front makes it an easier target. Having that head 10 feet above me kinda eliminates the range advantage of the poleaxe, and I’d not close on a standing bear no matter how tempting the underbelly looked.

Speed may make it a bitch to run away from, make it a bitch to shoot, but flat out running is not how you win a fight from either side. I’ve seen video of bears running, and you’re right that they’re brown blurs. I’ve seen video of humans moving, and they can be blurs too - not when running, but when dodging, spinning, evading, etc. You practice martial arts - surely you’ve seen it too? A charge is an attack to be aware of, but not an insurmountable, indefensible one.

The one thing you’ve both mentioned that made me stop to think, though, is the fur. Bear fur is dense, and I can see how it would provide very very good protection from slashing and chopping attacks (though not so much from penetrating attacks). All of my slash/chop examples have been with hair-less beasties (the water-buffalo, whales) and when I apply that to my mental equasion, it lengthens the odds. It’d be a game of damage over the long haul, and it’s tough to win when you’ve got to count on landing several good blows, but getting hit will ruin your day.

shrug Well, the only way to know for sure would be to pit several knights against several grizzlys, which I’d hate to see happen. I’m getting kinda sick from imagining gaping fleshwounds being inflicted on bears though. I’m rather fond of them, believe it or not.

[Misery_Loves_Co]

I read your post, chronos, and it seems to boil down to the same argument:

Bears are fast and powerful, faster and more powerful than a human. I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I disagree with the fundametal premise of “you only get one shot or it’s over”, and I’m not what any of us can do to convince the other.

I do want to modify a line in my last post though.

I said:
"It’d be a game of damage over the long haul. . . " as if I thought it’d be a simple kill before factoring in bear-fur. I didn’t ever think one shot would do it (unless incredibly lucky), but 4-5 shots that really open it up or disable it (crushing joints or severing tendons). But with fur to contend with, I think it’d really minimizes the likelyhood of such traumatic shots being consistently landed.

[GomiBoy]

@Misery Loves Co.

Of course, of course. But that doesn’t seem to be the case w/ bears, so mass has something to do with the ability to absorb that shock, no? That’s my point. You’d have to scale up the bullet to bear-size, so say small artillery peice,to do the same shock damage to a bear that you’d do with a .45 ACP to a human. But if you open either a human or a bear up with a knife/blade/axe, they loose large amounts of blood.

Sorry, it don’t work that way. People shoot and kill bears all the time with the calibers already mentioned - .44, .357. .30-06, 7mm, etc. By shock I am not talking about the clinical term ‘shock’ but more like what the physical effects of a bullet hitting something that’s 70% liquid (flesh). It don’t matter if it’s bear flesh or human flesh, the effect is identical, and it is nasty. It’s the shock to the tissue and the internal organ damage that kills you, not the little bitty piece of metal or the smallish hole it creates that kills. F’r instance, the .45 caliber cartridge was designed for cavalry soldiers; the M1911a1 pistol, firing that cartridge, was designed to knock down a charging horse during trench warfare. It don’t matter that a horse weighs more than a person, the effect is identical on both.

Secondarily, blood drainage takes a long time. If you open, say, the femoral artery, you’re dead in seconds. But unless you go into combat with your legs wide open, you’re not likely to have that happen. Main arteries run, in humans and in bears, on the inside of limbs and trunks and torsos, not the outside - hence my comment before about how if you’re in a knife fight, the only way you’re gonna take someone out in one blow is by cutting off a limb, cutting off their head, or getting them in the heart. Anything else will take hours if not days for them to bleed out. And that’s on us soft and pasty humans; bears are even tougher than we are, and have layers of fur and whatnot on top for added protection.

@Misery Loves Co.

Again, apples to oranges. Bullets pack the punch they need to to stop humans, guns are easy to shoot, they’re the perfect tool for the job. If it was some crazy world where human armies faught against bear armies (stupid, but go with me), we’d upscale our standard infantry weapons to 1-shot 1-kill standards for bears and retain the guns because they allow us to kill at a distance. Again, you can’t compare guns to polearms. They inflict different damage and are used in different ways.

You should read His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. (link here). One of the main characters was an armored intelligent bear! It was cool! I’d highly recommend the series to anyone.

@Misery Loves Co.

Well, because of that bear pun, I’m afraid we’ll have to take this out back. You’ve your choice of weapons - I assume you’ll be using a bear? I’ll forgo the armor/halberd combination in favor of stiletto and off-hand howitzer.

Fine, I’ll take a Tomohawk cruise missile from 200 miles away. Hey, I said I like distance weapons!

@Misery Loves Co.

I disagree that a halberd or other poleaxe can be dismissed as an “unwieldy weapon” - in trained hands, weapons aren’t unwieldy, or they’re useless. “Jinkin’ and jivin’” just underscores how trivial you think that an aware human’s responsed could be.

Sorry, should have been a bit more specific. Unweildly in the circumstances, with a bear coming at you damn quick. You’re swinging a large piece of metal around, and I still reckon you’ve got one shot to get him in the head or chop off a leg, or you’re well and truly screwed. And Jinkin’ and jivin’ is just slang; I take it to mean moving quite quickly in various directions. I called it that during hand to hand training during Special Forces boot camp, so I think I do understand how fast someone can move. Some of my instructors were blurs kicking my butt, that’s for sure! I just still think a grizzly with it’s dander up would be faster, with more reach, etc. etc. etc…

@Misery Loves Co.

I know bears kill elk and deer, but they don’t catch them in flat-out rushes when the prey is aware.

Yes, actually, they do. They run in short sprints up to 40-50 miles per hour; that’s way faster than an olympic sprinter and the only North American big game animal faster from a standing start is an antelope. A bear will come thundering out of a bush or some such and run down an elk that does know it’s there. The only way the elk gets away is by running before the bear starts his charge, or the elk is lunch.

@Misery Loves Co.

Only a small portion of their diet is red meat, and that is scavanged as well as “caught”. Also, deer and elk don’t fight back, which requires different reflexes than just getting the hell out of dodge. This is a fight, remember?

I gotta disagree again, on both these points. Yes, bears prefer to scavenge, but they do sometimes have a significant portion of their diet as protein and they are always looking for more of it (especially in the fall and spring, when they are going into or coming out of hibernation). As for the ‘prey’ fighting back, bull elk have a pretty massive rack of antlers that will work as a weapon quite well, as do deer, and they’re both a hell of a lot faster than you are in full plate no matter how well it fits! And both elk and deer will fight back, like any animal, if they’re being attacked by a bear. They just don’t do it well.

Don’t worry, mate - I fully believe you like bears. I love the suckers - they get a bad rap from ignorant or frightened people, and that I will try to always change people’s minds about, but this here discussion is all in fun, me thinks, and the most fun I’ve had on the Dope in, well, days anyways!

[lno]

@Misery Loves Co.

but I disagree with the fundametal premise of “you only get one shot or it’s over”, and I’m not what any of us can do to convince the other.

I do want to modify a line in my last post though.

I said:
"It’d be a game of damage over the long haul. . . " as if I thought it’d be a simple kill before factoring in bear-fur. I didn’t ever think one shot would do it (unless incredibly lucky), but 4-5 shots that really open it up or disable it (crushing joints or severing tendons). But with fur to contend with, I think it’d really minimizes the likelyhood of such traumatic shots being consistently landed.

Are you trying to land blows, or are you trying to stay out of the bear’s reach? If you’re swinging off-balance as you backpedal and duck behind trees, I question how effective you would be, and if you set your feet and attack a bear with a melee weapon, it seems to me that the bear would be upon you by definition.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Misery Loves Co.

Stranger, in the other current bear thread you had no problem accepting that a person successfully kept a black bear away from them by using cover. What’s different in this scenario? Kodiaks and Grizzlys are bigger, definitely, but do they have some sort of special skill at getting around large trees and leaping over boulders?

If you’re referring to this post by Mr. Duality (about his friend and a sow) I’m a little dubious; not that his friend met up with a bear, but I doubt the momma was trying to hurt him. She was probably trying to keep herself between the cub and his friend. As I said before, bears aren’t just straight-line fast, they’re dexterous as well. They climb up trees and have been known to jump from one tree to another, if the branches are substantial enough. They can catch and flick salmon out of a river. Their instincts, both grizzlies/kodiaks and especially blacks, are as much or more prey than predator. In the past 20,000 years the really big predators–the dire wolf, the saber-tooth tiger, and the short-faced bear–have all died out, but prior to that, these animals considered U. americanus. and U. a. horriblis to be food, so their survival (especially the non-tree climbing grizzly) depended in no small part on speed and agility.

@Misery Loves Co.

Great, actually. Having the head lower and in front makes it an easier target.

Well, yes and no. Yeah, it’s within reach, but because of the aspect (low, coming to you) it’s hard to hit the critical part (head, ‘neck’) instead of the well-protected back. And if you just wound a bear, you’re going to initiate a fight response, just like someone socking you in the jaw causes you to pump adrenelin. Now he’s not just curious or trying to bluff you–his life is in danger and he’ll act accordingly. You’re not going to have the chance to land several good blows; you’re going to have one chance to land one incapacitating blow, and if you’ve ever dealt with or seen an aggressive dog, you know how hard it is to get the dog to stop. You knock the dog down, and he just gets back up; you hit him again, and he gets back up. Think of a bear as a 500+ pound dog who is looking at you like you’re a can of Iams.

On the other hand, you spray OC pepper in their eyes, and they freak out. It’s a totally novel experience for them; they’re in pain, they can’t see, and it came from nowhere (as far as they can figure out). It’s not the damage, or even the pain, that stops them, but the sheer inexplicableness of it.

So, you can have your halberd and a suit of armor, and I’ll take a Seattle Police-sized can of pepper spray, and we’ll see who walks away from the bear.

Stranger

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@GomiBoy

By shock I am not talking about the clinical term ‘shock’ but more like what the physical effects of a bullet hitting something that’s 70% liquid (flesh). It don’t matter if it’s bear flesh or human flesh, the effect is identical, and it is nasty. It’s the shock to the tissue and the internal organ damage that kills you, not the little bitty piece of metal or the smallish hole it creates that kills.

To expand on this, what GomiBoy is referring to is hydrostatic shock. The theory is somewhat convoluted and contested, but the idea is that a bullet moving at high speed through a mostly liquid medium (flesh) creates a shockwave (or that the collapsing void behind is causes a wave, depending on who you talk to) which turns material outside the immediate wound channel into hamburger. Whether the theory is “valid” or not, the fact remains that high speed rifle bullets do a lot more damage than the diameter of the wound channel would suggest on its own. Blades are nasty in their own way in that they create (relatively) enormous wound channels but as Chronos noted, the animal can take seconds or minutes to bleed out, even if you’ve struck an artery, and in the meantime he’s still swatting and biting.

Stranger

[Misery_Loves_Co]

So I had a nice long reply posted for Gomi and lno, saw two more from Stranger, and am conceding this fight, if for no other reason than it’s half past quitting time and I’m still sitting in my cube. That’s dumb.

My parting shot is only this: killing a bear is without a doubt tough, and there are better ways of doing so than in plate and with a halberd. However, these things do even the odds, if only somewhat. I still maintain that plate serves a protective purpose, even against an angry bear. It ain’t bear-proof, but it ain’t designed to be.

So tell me, do our ursine overloards prefer clover or orange honey?

Cheers -

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Misery Loves Co.

So I had a nice long reply posted for Gomi and lno, saw two more from Stranger, and am conceding this fight, if for no other reason than it’s half past quitting time and I’m still sitting in my cube. That’s dumb.

Awww…and I was enjoying this so. It’s so much more civilized (ironically) than the “Yes it is,” “No it’s not.” “Well, ffff you!” “Well, ffff you and your little dog, too!” brawls in The Pit

@Misery Loves Co.

So tell me, do our ursine overloards prefer clover or orange honey?

I’m guessing they want some of this Italian Organic Forest Honey along with their Baked Salmon with Lime and Dill.

Stranger

[GomiBoy]

@Stranger On A Train

Awww…and I was enjoying this so. It’s so much more civilized (ironically) than the “Yes it is,” “No it’s not.” “Well, ffff you!” “Well, ffff you and your little dog, too!” brawls in The Pit

I’m guessing they want some of this Italian Organic Forest Honey along with their Baked Salmon with Lime and Dill.

Stranger

Me, too! I wanna be a servant for our new ursine overlords! Can I be the one that takes care of their fur? Please!

Seriously, thanks for a fun debate. This was really cool.

Stranger - I didn’t realize that hydrostatic shock was still just a theory. I saw some motion capture video one time of a bullet hitting a transparent block of gelatine that had been mixed to represent human flesh; it was pretty shocking the amount of damage done.

That, plus I have seen enough wounds in both animals and in people from gunshots that I know something else is doing the damage; the damage is just too huge to be simply from the bullet itself…