Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Bear Spray Works, I guess . . .

After you get your azz chewed up pretty good . . .

Two Guides get Munched on

Yes sir, and that's why I will give myself a shooting chance by carrying my sidearm any time I even think that there's a threat, especially by one of those killing machines!

I saw a nat geo special years ago about some grizzly cubs that were living in a compound and they were basically destroying all vegetation therein. The keepers were taking habanero peppers and pureeing them and then spraying the remaining trees to try and save them from the bears. The bears loved the sauce and would line up and let the keepers spray the concoction directly into their mouths. I figured then bear spray was just about like Texas Pete for us humans.

Yep, bears commonly eat skunk cabbage roots in the spring and fall. It tried a nibble a few years back. Kind of sweet at first, then you feel the burn, for quite some time. They eat it like candy.

I think that if a bear is just nosing around bear spray will potentially drive it off, if a bear is charging and you actually have time to pull your can of spray out and get a squirt off, it probably isn't going to help your situation.

I don't have a problem with bear spray other than if a bear is making a genuine charge the effective range of pepper spray is well inside my personal bubble, the wind can cause the spray to incapacitate you and a percentage of bears are unaffected by it. But other than that it's great stuff.

"deployed bear spray" ??? Would like to see more details

CrowRifle,

Eating capsaicin and being sprayed are two different things.

One of the interesting things that happened after "bear spray" became common here in Montana, especially around Glacier and Yellowstone Parks, is that many tourists thought it worked like insect repellent: They started spraying down their kids and tents to keep bears away. This did NOT please the kids, and bears chewed up the tents because they liked the taste.

Eventually manufacturers started putting BIG notices on the cans that they spray did not work like DEET.

Yeah I know, but the bears were getting the pureed habanero peppers sprayed in their eyes and nose at the same time too. No effect.

I remember a former co-worker who was coming back from a fishing trip and somehow the safety cap on his pepper spray came off. When he sat down in his car the pepper spray discharged. Not the most pleasant experience, and his coworkers got to laugh at him.

I used to tell students who were complaining of hangnails: "I can't work", and other minor 'boo-boos' in shop classes, that if they offered to put their thumb on the anvil, I could help them forget their other problems. While I didn't get any takers, I kind of figure bear spray would largely work in a similar fashion shortly before getting 'boo-booed' by a bear, (the bear spray being the 'hangnail' of course. )

There are plenty of parts of Alaska where the wind almost never doesn't blow, and 'wind' is such a relative term too. (There is a reason why the same plants which grow inches or feet high in the interior generally grow flat on the ground out along the coast.)

I remember reading a study years back that indicated the effectiveness of bear spray when sprayed on rocks and boulders was an attractant, which was the opposite of the desired effect.lol

I carry bear spray as part of a "kit".

CrowRifle,

I must have missed the eyes-and-nose spraying in the article. All I saw was "deployed."

Has some other info appeared?

Found this article with a few more details. Although not very descriptive, it does give a few details. Appears this front group was quite separated from the larger group and no one was able to ready or deploy any defense/spray before contact was made..

https://craigmedred.news/2016/08/21/bear-groaned-and-attacked/


Aces I would like to see a link or reference to this "study" you speak of.

well that sucks, some days you're the windshield some days the bug.


hope she recovers well.


heckuva thing to have happen, but it can and does.

Interesting.



Also interesting.

I think this is it....


LatestPopular
Preventive use of pepper spray may attract bears - not repel them
Published: Fri, Feb. 13, 1998, 12:00 a.m. MST


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It's not what backpackers and hikers want to hear - the pepper spray they count on to scare off bears may actually attract the big beasts, like catnip does cats.

The evidence, so far, is just anecdotal. But the stories are worrisome - bears chewing up plane pontoons doused with the spray and crowding into recently sprayed camp sites, U.S. Geological Survey researcher Tom Smith said.Smith discovered the attraction in November when he saw a bear rolling on a rope sprayed just a week earlier with powerful red pepper extract. He was recording brown bear activity near salmon streams in the Katmai National Park and Preserve, 240 miles southwest of Anchorage.


Intrigued, Smith jumped from his observation post and sprayed the beach with repellent. Several bears approached the beach 40 times to paw and roll in the spray.

"It's a 500-pound cat with a ball of catnip," Smith said.

For those who spend a lot of time in bear country - and that's anyone hiking in Alaska's backcountry - this isn't good news. Pepper spray is considered by many to be a good alternative to carrying a powerful shotgun. Tests have shown that it will stop a charging bear if sprayed in the bear's eyes, nose and mouth.

Nothing Smith found disputes those tests. But preventive uses of the spray - even spray residue on the can itself - can lure the huge, deceptively quick and potentially dangerous bears. On Sunday, an oil worker was killed by a brown bear that emerged from its winter den near the Kenai Peninsula.

Counterassault of Bigfork, Mont., which first marketed the spray, isn't worried by Smith's findings, said general manager Pride Johnson, though some people mistakenly treat it like mosquito spray.

"We've had some parents spray it on their children because it says bear repellent," Johnson said Wednesday. The company has begun changing the wording on its packaging to bear deterrent instead of repellent.

Smith's preliminary results should be noted by hikers and others, said Stephen Herrero, a bear expert at the University of Calgary and author of a book on bear attacks.

"They are going to have to think twice about how they store it, especially at night," Herrero said. "The big question of course is, `Do you sleep with it under your pillow?' "

Smith suggested treating a used can like food, putting it in a bear-proof container, and keeping an unused can in the tent while camping. Smith said he plans more testing next summer - and he'll continue carrying the spray.

But the evidence so far has him confident he's on the right track. He has submitted what he found for publication in the Wildlife Society Bulletin.

In the fall, he watched a float plane pilot spray his pontoons in an effort to keep bears away. The next morning, the floats were chewed up.

More from ADN ...
http://www.adn.com/alaska-news/wild...ner-tells-the-story-behind-bear-mauling/

Aces,
Thanks, I misread earlier and confused your comments with CrowRifles.