Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Major Bear Spray Failure: Carry A Gun !!!

I have an acquaintance who has shot 2 black bears charging him, as a timber cruiser here in BC he was allowed to carry a handgun...44 mag.
Also to note, its impossible to even guess how many charging bears are shot around here as 99% are not reported.
Not reported because they don't want to be labelled and then charged by authorities, but I can assure you that I have heard from a great many people who have done so.

Soooo. ..cal-o-mine,
Lived in Alaska since 1958. Exclusively. 37 kills to my name. Have hunted north of the Brooks and south, lived on the west coast several years, hunted the Aleutians, Kodiak many times, South Central, the Panhandle, the Yukon from the Canook border to the Pacific. Been around many times a hundred bears.
You are still an ass. What's your point other than being that ass? (The question is a rethorical statement...no need to answer )

Those posting details of their bear encounters and even photos not only make the thread a more interesting read but adds much validity to their claims of experience.

Like usual, it is both complicated and political.

The state of Montana has been somewhat vocal about wanting a hunting season. The feds, especially local feds generally do too, but the greenie lawsuits have stalled it, and I don't think this new administration will help matters at all.

Our prior governor and FG commission didn't want a g- bear hunting season, heard it with my own ears.
Now maybe with a new Governor and Commission we got a chance.
Theres plenty of Bear Biologists here to that don't want one either same with the wolves.
Think about how much money they get from grants studying them, take the money away and they dont have a job. Hunting season means less grant money.

I think we need a hunt here in Eastern Idaho pretty bad. In about 2013 they set a live trap just off of Highway 20 between Mack's Inn and elk creek. They trapped 13 grizzlies in about 6 weeks and put collars on them and then released them. We bow hunted elk right by there in 2014 and ran into a hunter that had just has a close incounter of the grizzly kind and was shaking so bad he could hardly speak.

We always see lots of bear sign in Island Park and one of my hunting partners was charged by one a few years back. They have no fear of man but I think if they were hunted a bit they would learn to avoid people more.

Bb

That's one problem, we're all trying to survive and maintain.

People have made career's of studying Grizzly Bears, Wolves, FL Panthers, etc that are completely dependent on these 'recovery' management plans.

What fool would step up to the plate and say, 'it worked, we achieved our numbers, we're done'.

They'd be out looking for a job in a very limited field of work, their program would be over.

That alone is plenty enough incentive alone for one to skew the data. Could you truly blame them?

When we had a very well managed hunt, we were allowed 25 bears a year or 17 sows, which ever came first.
I never recall a season being closed early to to the sow quota being achieved.
We were primarily hunting trophy bears, this meant big boars, nobody was targeting the smaller sows.

Our 25 bear quota not only included the sow clause, it included EVERY BEAR that died, problems bears that had to be euthanized, road kills, poached bears, the bears killed on the railroad tracks feeding on grain spills, EVERY BEAR!

In the later years, after having a active hunting season was being challenged the management became more intense.

They broke the state up into a schit pot of Grizzly hunting regions.
Each region had it's own allowable bear harvest numbers.
It was 3 bears or 1 sow for some regions, no bears for some regions, 2 bears or 1 sow for another and so forth.
Of course the state wide 25/17 number still ruled over all.

It wasn't long after the season was permanently closed the numbers of bears being killed yearly exceeded the numbers the hunt had ever killed.
This was mainly due to there being more problemed bears.
Bears showing up in places people didn't want them, like their backyards.

The numbers of sow's having to be killed was off the charts.
Anyone with even a thimble full of bear knowledge knows why.

More boars in a limited habitat, boars eat Cubs!
The sows were moving their Cubs out of their normal range for survival.

So then due to the recovery management plan, they were killing not only more bears but the wrong bears.

Last time I searched out the numbers of bears killed due to the screwed up management plan has been quite a few years back.

I recall it going from the mid 30s then up into the 40s rather fast.
After a quick check just now I am seeing this,

more than 300 bears have died in the past five years, according to federal data. By comparison, in the 10-year stretch from 2000 to 2009, 269 bears were killed in the same area, according to federal data.*

Their recovery program kills bears!

So when these numbers don't work for them, what'd they do?

They raise the numbers...


Despite these studies and repeated federal court rulings, bear managers are still managing the population according to the 2016 conservation strategy, a document created to guide how bears would be managed after delisting. According to that strategy, a minimum population of 500 bears must be maintained, though current management practices aim to maintain a population of about 675 to 747 bears.

Under the 2016 strategy, wildlife managers changed allowable mortality levels to increase the number of bears that can be killed each year. Prior to the change, the bar was set by a 2012 study from the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team that recommended a maximum mortality of 7.6% of female bears and 15% of independent males as the baseline for maintaining a stable population in the GYE*.

The new allowable mortality rate allows 9% of independent females and 20% of independent males to die each year.

In fact, 10.8% of female grizzlies died in 2015. In 2016, 16.7% of independent age male grizzlies died. In 2017, 8.4% of female grizzlies died. In 2018, 15.3% of independent age male grizzlies died. The majority of bears that die are killed by wildlife managers as a consequence of predation on livestock or visiting human sites, according to a Montana Free Press analysis of federal data.*

I gotta go help my dog chase some squirrels up into the trees, I'll get back to this rant later.....or not.


* All this data is based on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
*https://montanafreepress.org/2020/07/15/recovered-to-death/

That hasn't been my experience but I would agree your new governor, like or hate his way of doing things, may try to push this along more than any prior governors Montana has had recently.

Bear Lives Matter.

Yes Mike, they certainly do!

Ever since I was just a wee las and ol' Walt Disney decided to apply human like names to animals and even make words come from their mouths I've pondered, Just what kind of humans do they most closely represent?



I've spent endless hours on the back of my horse wandering through the mountains just sitting and thinking about this question.



There's my mules for instance, we take everything we have, including the kitchen sink, pile it all on their backs and make them climb mountains and swim rivers just so we can have a comfy camp.

Yet they seldom complained, we'd work them until their shoes wore thin. Then we'd just throw them on the ground, pound on a new set of shoes and make them do it again.



These mules had to do all the work and they got no respect at all!

Due to all these things, I deem mules to be the Mexicans of the animal kingdom. That's the humans they most closely represent.


Then there's these bears, just what type of human might they most closely represent? There must be something in their character that could help define them.

They seem to always be getting into trouble..



Even people that like them know they are best avoided if you don't want do have problems with them.

They come in all colors from light tan to jet black and that's a good thing because they often like to prowl around in the dark and it helps them stay hidden.

They seem to know when I'm away and no matter how well I lock up they manage to break in and steal all my stuff.



Some times they just seem to tear schit up for no reason at all.



Yet no matter what they do be it rob, pliage or even kill, people seemingly come outta the woodwork to protect them.

It's as if they can do no wrong, anything goes.

If you shoot one all hell is sure to break loose.

Hell, even Yogi spent his entire career teaching his son Booboo how to swipe people's stuff while evading law enforcement and everyone thought it was cute.



Maybe someone here could help me with this life long question.

Just what people do these bears most closely represent?
There must be something in their character that helps define them.

Jeff, from what you tell us, I'd say they might resemble the hood rats of Chicago. No matter how much killing, stealing, and destruction they cause, the government continues to protect them.

P.S.- Thank you for sharing your insight and knowledge. This is a very interesting thread to an Easterner who has never had to deal with critters that'll kill you.

Like the picture of your pack string. Deckers? All mantied up too. Got a book by a fella from up there that helped me a bunch when I wanted to pack some. Smoke Elser. I couldn't find his obit, so he must still be kickin. Between his and Joe Backs book I was able to do a passable job. I'm still a bit of a pretender though with sawbucks and panyards.

Also, thanks for the real world experience that you have generously shared with us about the bears. Yours coupled with JB's pretty much mirrors mine (Though mine is much less)

One summer my buddy Marc and I decided we wanted to be Mountain Men. We were suburban boys from Atlanta. We decided to go to the wilderness of British Columbia. We got up there to the wild regions and we flew back into the bush with a pilot named "Midnight Jim" Anderson. His house was right on the Alaska Highway and he, believe it or not, used the Alaska Highway for a runway.

After Jim flew us in to the wilderness, we rented horses from a big game guide and we were off by ourselves for several months of wilderness adventure. Of course we had a pack horse. When we were doing our own mountain man training in Atlanta we got this book and this is how we learned how to pack a horse. We even built our own panniers from plywood.



On the drive up to BC from Atlanta we actually stopped by Joe Back's house in Wyoming and visited with him for several hours.

Exellent pics and storys JeffA

Man I sure would have liked to talk to Joe, but I was too late coming into Wyoming.

simonkenton7;
Top of the morning to you and all the rest of the participants here, I hope all is as well as can be in your respective lives.

This thread has been a lively, entertaining and sometimes even educational exchange, thanks to "most" of the participants for that.

The Joe Back book is absolutely wonderful and if anyone is even remotely interested in horse packing, horses or really fine pen and ink art work for that matter, I can heartily recommend it. As a by the way before I leave this part, I had a photocopy of the knots for tying my bags onto the saddle when our lives included horses and horse packing.

Thanks to JeffA for the photos, I always enjoy seeing strings of horses and how they're packed. Thanks for the bear photos too Jeff.

Anyways here's a couple more scans of pictures from ancient days in southern BC.







Changing the topic to bear spray, I'll share the following story about it's effectiveness.

Once upon a time we had a cougar working the neighborhood regularly enough that it caused our neighbors enough concern they were considering purchasing a firearm to carry while they walked their ancient Golden Lab around the semi-rural area we call home. As they'd been traditionally anti-firearm of all sorts and had no clue how long it'd take them to legally acquire said arms up here in the so civilized north, I offered them a spare can of bear repellent.

This turned out to be fortuitous as one can only imagine what would've resulted if I'd loaned them say a 1911...

For reasons that were not clear to anyone relating the tale of woe after the fact, the safety tab was almost immediately discarded. Somehow in the narrow stairwell of their home, when the innocent senior citizen Lab and the neighbor's wife were descending said said stairwell, the can came out of her jacket pocket and as it bounced on each stair managed to go off directly into both the lady and the dog.

Perhaps now is the time to say neither occupant of the stairwell would have been considered a "small specimen", so then the gentle reader can better envision a large ancient Golden Lab attempting to run up the stairs to escape the demon mist which his formerly loving master was unleashing on him.

Honestly when she was telling me the story it was all I could do to keep it together. I will admit I absolutely could not when I relayed it to our family afterwards......

One daughter kept asking, "But Dad, why would she take the safety off, that doesn't make any sense?"

Anyways, that's my bear spray story for now, but I do have another one for another day that interestingly enough involved a dog as well.

As my fellow BC friend 673 said, we have no shortage of bears here in south central BC and I very much suspect that many of the bear shootings do not get reported as life is much simpler sometimes when that happens. I'm not in any way, shape or form condoning anything that even has the whiff of illegality, merely stating an opinion on what I hear in the wind when I'm quiet and nothing more.

All the best to you all and do stay safe out there.

Dwayne

Yes, I exclusively use the 'decker's style pack saddle though there is nothing wrong with the crossbucks.



Each saddle was custom built using brass D rings and Cotton wood bars. We rasped the Cotton wood to form a perfect fit for each mule.

Smoke Elser and I both ran back county camps in the wilderness complex here in NW Montana in the same era. His camp was a good ways from mine so we rarely crossed paths until the winter months at different outfitter conventions or the F&G outfitter meetings.

He was quite the character but then some say I am as well.

Thanks for all the kudos, I've enjoyed the thread myself.

JeffA...are those pics from south east BC?

No, all Montana.

Smoke was alive last summer.
His packing book is not as good as Joe Back's.
Joe's book was the packers Bible, there is one at my book shelve.
Horsemanship is the first requirement and Joe points this out. A man that rides poorly will also pack that way.
I don't carry pepper spray or a revolver. I do carry a stubby 12 ga, 3" style/ takedown. The wind won't blow the SSG back into my face.