BEAR!

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO? WHAT SHOULDN'T YOU DO?

Anyone who hikes, camps, hunts or fishes in bear country has thought about it. Those who live or work where bears also live need to be ready for it. Discussion groups online are filled with opinions on it. Friends around campfires entertain each other with legends about it.

What should you do when confronted by a bear?

SLIM CHANCES

First know this: despite highly publicized accounts, bear attacks—and specifically human fatalities from bear attacks—are extremely rare. How rare? Well, that's a tricky question because every source seems to document its statistics a bit differently. Some list any type of encounters, some actual attacks, some include incidents in zoos, some include only stats where human fatalities occurred.

One source (Blog.Batchgeo.com) lists 183 fatalities from bears in North America since 1784. For our purposes, discounting the 28 that occurred from bears in captivity, brown bears accounted for 82 deaths, black bears for 66, and polar bears for 7. If that's even close to being accurate, that's a low number over the course of 238 years.

LOCATION, LOCATION

Not surprisingly, the chances of being killed by a bear are greatest where a large number of bears intersects with large numbers of people. According to that same source, a couple of national parks head the list. It cites 10 fatalities in Glacier National Park in Montana and 8 fatalities in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, all from brown bears. According to Alaska's News Source, however, bears accounted for 10 deaths in Alaska in the years from 2000 to 2017 alone. In North America overall, that source cites 46 fatal bear attacks (48 deaths) in that span, which averages to less than 3 per year.

SAFEGUARDS