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

Same kind of Country, thanks.

Great pics again, Jeff. Thanks.

We loved the book by Joe Back and we learned a lot from it. So on our trip from Atlanta to BC we decided to look him up. Now, this was back in the seventies, we found the town that he lived in but didn't know his address. We drove to the little town and stopped at a store and asked where Joe Back's house was. The guy in the store told us.
It was a Saturday evening about 6 pm and we just drove up to his house and knocked on the door. Joe lived way out in the country, maybe 10 miles outside of the town he had a lot of land I guess you would call it a ranch.

Joe was just finishing dinner and he wasn't real hospitable at first. He was about 75 years old, they were just finishing dinner, and he just about kicked us off the porch.
He said "What are you whippersnappers doing, barging in here at dinner time with no notice."

But, his wife saved the day. She came to the door, and she realized that these young guys from Georgia had gotten all inspired by her husband's book, and she invited us in.
She served us some coffee and Joe warmed up to our visit and we talked with them for several hours.
Joe was quite an artist and he had many of his drawings, framed in the house.

Joe was proud of us when we assured him that we had learned how to tie a diamond hitch from his book.
Joe emphasized that in his book, if you wanted to be a Mountain Man you had to learn to tie your own diamond.

Good advice, Doug. Coming from someone who has BTDT. Thank you.

Get tired of the speculators here sometimes.

Good stuff Dwayne......

I had a friend who was in a sporting goods store 15 or so years ago, when some random inexperienced people came in and were playing with the bear spray right next to him. This was before most (all?) bear spray canisters were in blister packs. Anyhow they were goofing around with it and (of course) got the safety tab off and sprayed my friend who was standing right next to them, right in the face.

He said it was HORRIBLE.

I laughed, at his expense.

I always carried both because not everything needs to be shot all the time.

You wouldn't make a very good cop lol.

Thanks local_dirt. Yep, a lot of lower 48 speculators here who haven't experienced it first hand. I know what works for me. JMHO

If you’re scared stay home. If you don’t have any common sense stay home. If you don’t have a big gun stay home. Sometimes sh*t just happens and the bear wins.

I like it. Blunt and to the point. The lack of common sense seems to be the big problem around here. Too many want to not keep a clean camp, get schit faced and act like a bunch of damned idiots, go off by themselves, and how many people in this day and age can actually read sign? Recognize fresh bear sign for what it is, or the smell of a rotting carcass....etc. Yeah sometimes sh*t does just happen, but most of the incidents I hear about here sound like they could have been prevented if the person was a little better prepared or payed a little more attention to their surroundings.

I believe cops usually have more than a firearm on their duty belt.

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.




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.



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/#axzz6ssdKskhA

In 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.




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.



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.

This has been my contention as well Doc … I rarely miss an opportunity to query the Big Game Biologist, Local Guides, Landowners etc. when given the opportunity.

Recently, I read Shelton’s “Bear Attacks the Deadly Truth and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in factual, unbiased accounts of these incidents.

Here in the Peace region (and other areas) it was just announced the Grizzly population has doubled since 2005, many (meaning all I speak with) believe that happened well before 2021 and that the population could well have quadrupled. Without a season, these encounters can only increase … time will certainly tell.

For those wishing to hear how quickly things can go south I will include a recent (2015) Grizzly attack on two sheep hunters in northern BC ( a little long so start at the 1:02 mark if desired, yes I know their rifles weren't at the ready).

As I posted somewhere earlier I used bear spray on aggressive dogs eight times over about a ten year period. To add context to that, that was a period in my life when I would frequently walk my then two blue heelers on long walks through my West Side neighborhood.

Loose dogs were frequent, and it was my observation that the inbound dogs were targeting my dogs more than me. Almost all aggressive-acting dogs on the street could be bluffed off through body posture and shouting. I prob’ly walked those dogs more’n 1,500 times during that decade, had to resort to bear spray IIRC jus eight or nine times.

Most times I missed the dog, the geometry of the spray can causes you to shoot low, it seemed the sudden blast and prob’ly unfamiliar odor startled the dog.

The one time the spray DIDN’T work was on a big female Rottweiler that came up unseen from behind after my dog. My dog ran in two big ovals trying to get away and yet stay by me and on each close pass I caught that rott full in the face at close range, twice.

About that time the apologetic owner came out, called off and leashedher dog. As we stood there talking, the dog did rub its face in the grass, prob’ly because of the sheer volume I hit it with, otherwise it didn’t act particularly distressed.

All of this to point out it might be just the sudden blast that startles the bear, not so much the capsasin itself.

Doc Roc, Sticks, and Birdw, all very interesting. Doc, special thanks for taking points and addressing them individually. Always informative.

Sorry, a pic of a pic here as it was ‘92 and pre-cell phone and it took effort to remember to take a pic. We watched grizzlies every day on this trip. It began when the outfitter flew over our tents, banked sharply to the right, and threw steaks out of the window of his Super Cub. But my eye was on a grizzly “standing” upright a hundred yards away, apparently, at least partly interested.

But the guide who placed his tent right next to ours had all the eggs, flour, and bacon and other goodies in it. His comment: “we’ve never had trouble yet.” 😊

While I’m at it, and again, I apologize for the pic. These pic’s are at least partially related to the topic at hand and this was taken in the Bob Marshal as we were leaving with two camps worth. The main camp was fully outfitted and had a grizzly tear into some horse feed in the tack tent one night and I heard that it resulted in all hands on deck and a general lack of peaceful sleep that night. They kept a dog in the camp as a general bear alarm and apparently he earned his keep even though he was a bit slow on the draw. Several bags were torn into and scattered about.

A friend and I were about three miles distant in a drop camp and we were in blacks every day to the tune of one to three sightings. They seemed very shy as we bumped several over the week. In the pic, on the ride out, we actually counted three more up on the hillsides above the tree line plainly out in the open.

Our outfitter was based in Choteau, Mt. and he told us they already had grizzlies spilling out of “the Bob” into the flat, private lands outside the wilderness..

I plainly missed a beautiful “beige” color phase black mostly behind a dead fall but with enough visible. And, yes, it was a black bear. It was a very beautiful fall and great trip.

Anyway, if a sobering topic can be both interesting and entertaining, this one is for me.

Great pics George! A couple friends and I backpacked around the Chinese Wall there I believe in 1988. I carried my 270 on that trip along with a lot of other heavy stuff. It was a workout and a great trip. Didn't see much wildlife and only one other group of hikers.

Just my take ..
Lots of videos lately of humans shaking off tasers and pepper spray. Probably wise to assume that some bears are hungry/ornery enough to ignore a bit of pepper until their adrenalin level drops...