| Please read papers thoroughly before citing! You are drawing a conclusion from these two studies that the authors themselves did not draw. Note that during an overwhelming majority of the encounters in the bear spray study, the bears were classified as "not aggressive." Contrast this with the firearms study, which specifically looks at bear attacks in which the human defended him/herself with a firearm. One should not be surprised that the study of bear attacks yields more injuries to humans! Most of the bears in the bear spray study were doing things like rummaging for food, not attacking people. The best takeaway, in my opinion, is in the conclusion of the firearms study: >Firearms should not be a substitute for avoiding unwanted encounters in bear habitat. Although the shooter may be able to kill an aggressive bear, injuries to the shooter and others also sometimes occur. The need for split-second deployment and deadly accuracy make using firearms difficult, even for experts. Consequently, we advise people to carefully consider their ability to be accurate under duress before carrying a firearm for protection from bears. No one should enter bear country without a deterrent and these results show that firearms are not a clear choice. We encourage all persons, with or without a firearm, to consider carrying a non-lethal deterrent such as bear spray because its success rate under a variety of situations has been greater (i.e., 90% successful for all 3 North American species of bear; Smith et al. 2008) than those we observed for firearms. Carry the deterrent or deterrents of your choice, try to avoid encounters in the first place, and practice using whatever it is that you carry, because neither firearm nor spray works if you miss. |