I don’t know if I’m bloviating or not but I find the comments interesting.
George, I made that comment because of the usual repititions of the old, tired jokes about grizzly sh*t smelling like pepper spray, and the "nothing short of a 500 S&W" comments. Reasonable questions and discussion is never bloviating.
But as I read of these incidents and others’ experiences, it seems bear spray works “a lot of the times.”
Bear spray DOES work. Every wildlife biologist who's studied bear attacks in the past 30 years has shown this. Gary Shelton's extensive bear studies in B.C. show it, for example, and there are many others.
Herrero et al. published their 2008 paper on the efficacy of bear spray and firearms. Their study was a retrospective case analysis, and that methodology carries with it all the inherent sampling bias, etc. They showed 92% effectiveness for bear spray, and 67% for firearms. HOWEVER... they did not differentiate among types of "undesirable bear behavior". So bears raiding pic-a-nic baskets or tearing up garbage cans were included alongside grizzlies attacking elk hunters field dressing their kills. The level of aggression in these different types of encounters is vastly different, and necessarily affects outcomes. A garbage bear situation would, in my estimation, be a Condition Yellow or maybe Condition Orange situation, whereas a genuine charge is a Condition Black situation. A garbage bear can be driven off with a broom or a kick in the butt (as that idiot woman in New Jersey keeps posting YouTube videos of her doing to tame black bears in her suburban yard), and pepper spray is a great deterrent to non-aggressive bears like this. However, a grizzly that is intent on driving you away from the carrion food cache he's guarding is unlikely to be as impressed by a pink cloud of pepper spray, and may still kill you even if you've put several bullets into his chest. It will make little difference to you that he will die of his wounds in 3-4 hours, if you are already dead.
I have discussed my views with other bear enthusiasts and wildlife biologists, and most tend to agree on these broad concepts. From all the info I've gathered on my own from bear encounters over the years, I'd say bear spray is probably about as effective as firearms in the aggregate of all bear encounters, but probably less effective on the smaller subset of aggressive bear encounters, and the more aggressive the bear, the less effective spray may be.
Gary Shelton's books give numerous examples of effective and ineffective uses of spray, which supports these generalizations. Shelton also notes that bears that have been sprayed before tend to be less susceptible the second time they're sprayed, and that bears that are truly attacking (as opposed to charging to chase you off) are also less susceptible to spray.
And handguns have stopped charges and even killed big bears. Even little handguns have. But all of these also have been carried by people who have been mauled and were killed.
A lot of folks subscribe to the notion that handguns are not effective against bears. I used to be one of them. This notion has been argued against anecdotally for many years, and members here like JJHack and JSP45 have considerable experience killing bears with handguns, as have others.
In 2012 Smith et al. published a study in which they compiled, summarized, and reviewed 269 incidents of bear–human conflict involving firearms that occurred in Alaska during 1883–2009. They found no significant difference in success rates (i.e., success being when the bear was stopped in its aggressive behavior) associated with long guns (76%) vs handguns (84%).
In 2018 (and revised in 2020) Dean Weingarten published a compilation of bear attacks in Canada and the US defended against by handgun, and found that of 93 cases, handguns were used successfully 97% of the time.
https://www.ammoland.com/2020/03/up...ack-93-cases-97-effective/#axzz6ssdKskhAIn other words, carrying a handgun for bear attack defense is not a stupid idea. Oh, unless it's a .22... Weingarten gives several instances where a .22 was used and failed to stop the attack.
Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but even if it breeds a certain laxness among those in bear country by hunting or fishing alone, it seems to be the first handicap already accepted; maybe not for the pro’s mentioned but it would certainly be for me. Does having a partner help ones chances of survival in a charge? Would bear spray even if unholstered, and pointed right, stop the bear above? The emphasis is on “dependably, all the time.” For me the same would be true of a handgun though I could be persuaded to carry one.
Having a partner is a definite advantage. Studies show bears are less likely to attack larger parties of people (5 or more, IIRC) than smaller parties. Shelton describes several cases where one person armed with a firearm and the other using bear spray were able to successfully defend an attack that either one alone may not have survived. I have spent many, many days solo hiking, fishing, and hunting in Alberta and B.C., but given the increasing boldness of bears in recent years, I doubt that I would be as likely to do that in those places today. Having a partner along makes a lot of sense.
Above, I mentioned a tactical type pump 12-ga loaded with slugs — would the sling hang up on a pack or some other obstruction or could it be brought to engagement on time? For me, the scenario in question is not the most-of-the-time, almost casual, moderate range contact of an indifferent bear who turns away. But the all-in bear that is maybe the one in a hundred or even a thousand. No matter how small the number, we all know we will read of it again.
In Canada, I had no handgun option due to their laws, so outside of the national and provincial parks I carried a 12-gauge pump gun (Win Model 12), and yes, I loaded it with slugs. I felt a lot safer with that in heavily populated grizzly country like the Swan Hills and the Willmore Wilderness Area. I only used it once, put a warning shot at the bear's feet and he departed the vicinity immediately. So, yes, a slug gun isn't a bad option. But a handgun is a better one, in my view.
