Tony wrote:
>
> The best reaction to a confrontation is to make oneself small and
> avoid making eye contact. In a charge, fall into fetal position with hands
> on back of neck. As a rule, the bear will lose interest in you when you
> cease to be a threat. Second best option is to use bear spray - hot pepper
> spray - and spray it in the bear's face.
But in a charge it is
> often hard to
> get a handle on the spray and use it properly.
You don't say?
We had a post grad Canadian forester while I was studying. He could tell
great yarns over a beer. One of his favourites was concerning cruising in
Canadian forests. The standard approach is to plot a forest using compass
and hipchain. In his case a compassman would set the route and the cruising
forester would record the data. They often came across bear (he said). He
told hysterically funny stories of compassmen running past him at a great
rate of knots, some of whom weren't that great at English. He maintained
that 8 times out of ten both parties would run away from each other, or -
once you got up a tree - the black bears (I think) would keep on running
past the tree. The grizzlies scared the proverbial out of him. They
stopped and shook the tree!
Forget the foetal position. I'd run.
CP
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