Well, this has been a really fascinating thread! Thanks for all the informative posts!
Now, if you had three or four knights with halberds (or various other nasty, pointy polearms!) facing the enraged beastie, I think the bear would definitely lose-- though the humans would definitely take some casualties! What do you think?
If the bear really feels his life is in danger, don’t you think he’s most likely to just get outta Dodge?
Probably a hijack, but this thread reminded me of a short video of another bear encounter.
Only in bloody Montana, where the men are men and the sheep are nervous, would someone think to tranquelize a bear out of a tree onto a trampoline! Nothing like redneck know-how and cowboy can-do! 
I love my home state sometimes…
That really depends. If he’s just been hit on the snout by someone with a sharp pointy thing who continues to try to hit him on the snout and has caused a wound, then the bear is rather likely to attack as best he can and continue to do so until whatever smacked him stops moving. Then he would likely jump up and down on that thing just to make sure it stopped moving. Then maybe take a bite out of it to see if he recognized whatever it was before he smacked it around and jumped up and down on top of it.
Which is a problem for our noble knight!
My personal opinion is that the guys would have the bear apart very quickly, and wouldn’t be nearly as likely to suffer any casualties, as long as they could keep their distance from the bear and continue to harass it from multiple angles. If anybody fell down, the bear would likely have him, but as long as the attackers kept their feet I think they’d stand an excellent chance of killing the bear without any of them getting hurt.
That’s assuming that the bear starts his charge from pretty close. They have the acceleration, but they don’t have the stamina. If a bear starts at an elk from 100 yards away, it’ll never catch up.
I agree with almost everything you said, but just for the record elk can fight quite well. They’re no match for a grizzly, but elk have killed quite a few other predators, including wolves. I certainly wouldn’t want to take a blow from a bull elk’s front hooves.
And I also agree that this thread’s been a lot of fun.
That depends on the situation. If a bear feels threatened, then yeah, it’ll just run if it can. But if you injure it, you are kicking on a fight response; because it can’t turn its back and run without risking more injury, the instinctive response is to fight.
Dr. Rogers makes the point several times that often when people get injured while feeding a bear it isn’t because the bear is being aggressive about wanting food, but because it has taken what the person has offered it and then is suddenly nervous about being so close to a person. As a result, it’ll swat at the person (usually pretty harmlessly–the idea that bears can disembowl someone with their claws in a single swipe is a myth) to give itself time and space to get away.
From this site:
If you’ve ever seen or been in a fist fight–one of those bar fights that starts because two drunk assholes won’t aplogize to each other–you know that there’s a period of posturing and bluffing, with each side not wanting to show weakness by backing down, and then finally someone gets nervous, throws a punch, and hell breaks loose from there. At that point, neither guy is thinking about backing down; all they know in the world is that point is that they have to keep throwing punches. Same thing.
Stranger
Sorry, should have been more specific; I meant that an Elk or deer wouldn’t be able to fight back efficiently if the bear got a hold of them, not that they couldn’t at all. Elk are big and strong and fast, and can do a hell of a lot of damage.
Why do I have a sudden mental image of a bunch of Dopers staging competitions in the woods jousting with grizzlies at the next dope fest?
Definitely; a bear can run that fast for only very short distances - I would say more like 50 yards even rather than 100.
Well, there’s no question that high speed (hypersonic) rifle bullets cause significantly more damage than a low speed pistol round, or than the nominal size of the wound channel would justify. You’re right; when fired into ballistic gelatin you can see a secondary area of disruption surrounding the wound channel. But exactly what causes this, and whether it is due to a “hydrostatic” pulse is still hotly debated. Some people claim that it is the shock wave of the bullet exceeding the “speed of sound” (natural rate of propagation) in the hydraulic medium of soft tissues, analogous to a sonic boom in air. Others claim that it is caused by the collapse of the wound channel after the passage of the bullet, kind of like cavitation. And some think that it’s caused by some other kind of action, like the wobbling or spinning of the bullet as it travels. (I think this is unlikely–if the bullet starts to wobble after it enters the body it is going to rapidly become dynamically unstable and start tumbling, but I’ve seen the claim.)
As far as I know, there isn’t any one accepted explaination in forensic literature, though, as a mechanical engineer, the “shock wave” explaination seems the most likely. But I’m not a doctor or a physiologist, so that’s just MHO.
Stranger
Makes good sense, and thanks for the deeper explanation.
Cheers
GomiBoy