Or, “in Russia, the great brown bear hunts you!” Mother Nature’s latest revenge fantasy come true is this hair-raising situation in Siberia. I pity those scientists for their predicament and terror, both the living and the dead.
Why wouldn’t the decision to shoot be more automatic? Here, if a bear [or dog, cougar, whatever] kills a human, that’s one dead bear walking.
Also, this rather upstages Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, doesn’t it? I almost hope this story inspires a knockoff SciFi network flick…
As an ARCO Alaska geologist working in bear country, we were given bear behavior and shooting courses each year, armed with guns and ammo, given clear instructions on under what circumstances (dire) it was permissable to shoot and, ultimately, the authority to do so. I can only WAG that things are real different in Russia because it does state that the camp is armed.
Three people a year on average die there from bear attacks? That seems awfully high.
You have obviously never seen the SciFi Channel’s Savage Planet have you? Standard sci-fi stuff. Group of scientists and there military escort disappear while studying an alien planet. Second group of scientist and military escorts are sent in to find out wheat happened. Turns they were eaten by…BEARS! And not alien bears but regular, stock footage, Earth bears. WORST. SCIFI CHANNEL MOVIE. EVER.
The rifles are for the scientists to defend themselves against each other. Otherwise, as I have know from having seen from the movie Aliens, one of the scientists would offer some of his colleagues to the bears as a peace offering, and then run like hell. If I was a short nebbish scientists with thick glasses I wouldn’t be feeling too confident of my chances right now, knowing that I would end up as the first sacrificial victim.
All it needs is Kurt Russell as a laconic helicopter pilot and some badly-dated but still eerie 'Eighties synth music and this could be John Carpenter’s comeback film.
Nah, in Russian films it’s the Georgian or Estonian Jew who is the token minority to be killed off to indicate to the audience how dangerous the situation is.
I think the geologists disturbed the earth’s crust with their invasive probing, causing some kind of magnetic shift that pissed off the bears there. If they don’t blow something up spectacularly pretty soon, it’ll spread through the crust to Yellowstone, making the bears there berserk as well. On the plus side, Chicago, UCLA and my cuddly UNCo Bears should be pretty awesome this fall.
I would think that the scientists would wait to be more directly threatened before shooting the bears. As far as I can tell, the situation now is that the scientists are more or less “safe” inside the camp and the bears are roaming outside - a status quo of sorts.
