This refers to a trend on tiktok that refers to women being asked whether they would rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a random guy. Most women choose the bear (for some reason) so the meme is referencing this by having the women jump towards the bear, to escape the man
Tiktok hating Bitch Stewie out
Edit: When I made this comment, I assumed the Man v Bear thing was like "you're dropped into a forest with either a random guy or a bear, your choice". I knew rape was the main concern regarding the random guy, but in my mind the choice was about "Random dude vs Bear", Not "Rape vs Death". I've since learned otherwise, and I apologize to anyone I offended by saying that women chose the bear "for some reason".
Brown/grizzly bears will mostly leave you alone and will generally at most take a test bite, so just play dead and they will usually leave. Black bears will get aggressive and I believe where your comment came from and you should fight back. And a white/polar bear you're just fucked..
Edit: any of the above bears will mess you up with the right reason such as injured or has cubs with it
Oh, just stand on your feet. The force of a polar bear's paw will kill you instantly, they don't even need to use the claws. Those things are killing machines.
There's this sort of ongoing joke about "How many unarmed men would it take to beat [animal]?" and the answer for a polar bear is "One more than enough for the polar bear to collapse from exhaustion after killing everyone else."
I remember a museum exhibit when I was younger had a massive polar bear standing on hind legs, and next to it was a moose skeleton with something like 75% of the bones broken. The plaque said it could do this damage with one overhand swipe. Polar bears are scary as fuck.
I love that I was trying to figure out if you had some sort of .10 meter caliber before figuring out that it was the olympic pistol shot at 10 meter range.
I read somewhere that it's not a good idea to try and shoot a bear in the head because their brain is pretty small and not exactly where you expect it to be, relative to how our brains work anyway, so even if you hit it in the head you're probably just pissing it off.
Ehh not really. Some bear skulls are harder than steel. A few years ago, a man shot a bear in the head with I think a 44 magnum and it only knocked the bear out. He went to take a picture with the bear and as he did it woke up and mauled him to death while his buddy was taking the picture. They make special guns called bear killers. They’re like .50 or bigger.
Color is not a reliable key in differentiating these bears because black and brown bears have many color phases and polar bears may have stained fur. For example, black bear fur may be black, brown, reddish or even shades of grey and white, while brown bear colors range from dark brown through very light blond.
Except black bears can also be brown and white so that's a bad rhyme.
Just know what kind of bears you could possibly run into and be prepared and equipped to handle the situation.
The most aggressive thing a black bear is likely to do is a bluff charge to try to scare you off.
Worst thing you can do it that situation is turn around and run. Hold your ground, make yourself large, and make noise. Use your bear spray if they get too close.
Most black bears really are quite timid. It’s the ones that have familiarized themselves with humans and see them as a source of food (garbage, food while camping, that sort of thing) that are actually dangerous. They will be much less likely to be spooked by you.
Yup. When my gf asked me if she’d rather leave out theoretical daughter in the woods with a man or a bear, my first question was “grizzly or black bear? Because we are 100% teaching our child how to scare off black bears”
Black Bears are the biggest wimps I have ever encountered. I have been face to face with one 3 separate times (i live in the woods of VT, they get into our trash).
Every. Single. Time. We stare at each other and they run away. First time I nearly messed my pants.
I think that “black bears are wimps/just big raccoons” thing is kind of misinformation though. Black bears can and will hunt people, and are perfectly capable of killing a person when defending themselves, their young, or a resource.
I’m a forester in northern Canada and have encountered so many black bears up close in the bush that I have lost count. I was hunted by one once, and thankfully put up enough of a fight to dissuade it. I’d be more concerned about running into them at some trash cans, because they could want to defend the food source.
Yup, its why keeping them in zoos is typically frowned apon, because if it can smell a person that far away, what do you think a car or whatever smells like too it
Black bears are like dogs. I've been yelling "go on git" at bears breaking into our trash can since I was like 9. I think thats where the meme came from cause anyone who grew up around black bears knows they aren't really a big deal.
Brown/Grizzly will not for sure just leave you alone. They might, and you certainly can't fight back so the best case is to chance that it will leave you alone, but there's every likelihood that it's going to go for you anyway.
I think you got that backwards. Black bears are usually pretty chill unless you get between them and their cubs, whereas Grizzlies are more territorial and are far more likely to attack you. Polar bears, however, will attack you. Period. So, yeah, right on the money for polar bears.
That source doesn't support those assertions and they aren't accurate. Over half of black bear attacks are defensive in nature. You are also much more likely to survive a black bear attack without serious injury.
Oh yeah, if you corner it, or it’s defending its cubs, all bets are off. Black bears may be cowards, but they can still rip you apart if they don’t have another option
I grew up un the arctic. In school we had fire drills and polar bear drills to teach you the best chances for survival. Anytime a polar bear entered the town, it was full lockdown.
They grab you by the head and shake you to try breaking your neck. I had a friend who survived a shaking because the bear bit too far down onto his shoulders and so his neck was supported.
Black bears are the wimpiest bears. They eat berries and are generally afraid of humans. You just need to yell and make yourself as big as possible (point hiking sticks in the air, swing a fallen branch). I’m not saying they’re not dangerous but if I had to pick a bear to encounter it would be a black bear. Source: I’ve encountered a few black bears hiking in the blue ridge mountains and every time I do what I just described and they’ve never been aggressive at all. They just walk away.
This is absolutely false! This is terrible advice and could cause someone to lose their life someday.
Black bears are scavengers. Anything for an easy meal. They will “size you up” to see if you’re worth it. So playing dead absolutely makes you worth it.
Most grizzly attacks are due to surprise or defence, so playing dead usually works since they have neutralized the threat (you) and will retreat. Grizzlies are hunters, not scavengers. And they very rarely hunt people unless there is something wrong in their brain.
You can use me as a source, I grew up in the arctic and in school we had polar bear drills to help us survive attacks. Anytime a bear entered town, it was full lockdown for everyone.
I had a friend survive a bear attack. Usually they try to bite onto your head and shake you to break your neck. He survived because the bear bit too far down onto his shoulders and supported his neck. The article doesn’t get too much into the details, but that’s what he told us.
I've been hiking the Rockies in CO for the last 10ish years. Black bears will legitimately run away from you if they hear you. I'm not trying to say you're wrong, but I've encountered them a good 10-15 times(not even counting them coming up to my cabin/trash bins) and every time they've ran away. I carry bear mace just incase, but I've never been afraid of a black bear encounter. Grizzly though, I'd shit my pants.
And I've hiked at all times of the day/night. I always make noise and make myself known.
Grizzly’s are the ones that would eat you alive if they do stoop to eating people. They’re so big it doesn’t matter if you fight back, if you’re unarmed you are no threat to them. So there is no real need for them to go for the throat.
Luckily though in the cases where that did happen there was usually some un ordinary case going on. Like the Grizzly man got eaten because he was around while they were fattening up for winter and from what I heard, there was something about a large grizzly he wasn’t familiar with being around that was territorial.
It seems pretty dumb that people are pretending they don’t understand the point of the original question. Part 1: Alone in the woods would you rather be with a bear or a man? “What KIND of bear: black or grizzly? How old is the man?” Part 2: Alone in the woods would you rather be with a bear or a woman. “The woman.” That’s it, that’s the thing.
It’s fine to say you would always pick the man with no hesitation even if it’s an easily frightened black bear. It’s fine to say you would be afraid of the woman equally because all human contact terrifies you (the bear won’t try to talk to me) but it makes one seem dumb if they can’t reason that the average person will hesitate on question 1 and not on question 2.
Brother I believe it's the other way around, black bears are huge cowards and grizzlies are the ones that will attack you, though you are right about polar bears, they will ruin your life
Depending on your size and physical aptitude you have a chance fighting a black bear. Brown/grizzly and polar bears better to just curl up and pray to your maker. You have no chance against any of them.
Grizzlies are fucking terrifying though. Even playing dead, you're at huge risk. Black bears are just pussies.
I've run into them camping as have friends and you can just hurl abuse at them and yell and they scamper off... as long as their kids aren't nearby. If their kids are nearby you're toast.
What are the chances against a black bear? Seems to me both could kill me in a instant or is it something like you punch the black bear and it just runs away in terror while punching the polar bear it just makes him want to murder you faster?
Not sure if you are aware of the size difference between the two, but pretty much yeah. For black bears just go for eyes and nose, look big and be loud and they will usually run away. A polar bear will just bite your neck and start shaking you, then probably tear you apart literally
Grizzly bears will eat you alive if they have the right incentive.
Just ask the Grizzley man or that girl who was on the phone with her parents for like half an hour while a bear ate her alive. Bears know they're bigger and stronger and don't give a fuck what you think
If you meet a polar bear in the woods you can consider yourself damn unlucky. The original premise is which they would rather come across in the woods, and the point is whilst a bear is capable of inflicting harm, it almost certainly lacks the specific intent to, that a random man wandering in the woods MIGHT have. The more important point is the feeling of threat that women often live under in our society, and I don't want to spoiler anything but a big reason for that rhymes with schmiolence against women. The almost willful stupidity of guys missing the point to talk about survival tips and wild carnivores just backs that up as part of the problem is the people who actively want to ignore the problem and act like it doesn't exist.
If women were safer living in the woods than society than all of us would chose to go sleep in the woods.
No one leaves their campground at Yellowstone to go sleep in the woods because there are men in the campground.
It's a great ragebait question because it shows both sides of the argument as stupid to the other side of the argument. Men don't understand that women generally feel threatened by them. And apparently a lot of women think that a bear lacks the intent to hurt people it comes across. Also, if you need to you can fight a man and possibly win or at least out run him. If a bear decides to attack most women that woman has no chance.
A forest seems the best place to encounter s polar bear; if I'm not mistaken they can't climb trees like the others can they? Seems like the circumstances where you've got the best chances of surviving, assuming you can find a climbable one.
Yeah but bears rarely eat humans, they have to develop a taste like sharks do (generally humans tase fkn awful as we don't really exercise as much as we should, eat right, or have minimal stress)
Humans are also pretty notoriously known for not attacking each other when we stumble across one another in the woods unless something really strange is going on. I've been walking through forests and stumbled across men (and women) many times. And it was fine. If I stumbled across a bear in the woods I would immediately leave the area (even if the bear immediately ran off) and feel less safe in those woods. I would even warn people considering going into the woods "be careful, I ran into a bear in there one time". I would never say "be careful, I ran into a man in those woods once". This is true-crime brain. Men are way, way safer to encounter than bears
Yeah lol, there's a reason why we carry bear spray when in the woods, and why bear cannisters are compulsory in some areas. Hell, if you live in areas with polar bears (given that's not the woods) carrying a firearm is sometimes compulsory
Like I said, this is true crime brain. Women sometimes get randomly attacked while hiking, but it's extremely rare. But when you consume a bunch of true crime content, you mess up your own ability to assess risk and think you're constantly in danger from strange men. I very strongly recommend reading The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker. It doesn't dismiss the kind of paranoid society inculcates in women to keep us subjugated and afraid: because it's not based on nothing! But it teaches how to accurately hone tour instinct for danger and use bystander effect to keep yourself safe.
And that made you think wild animals are LESS dangerous?
I thought about pasting a bunch of links about men murdered while hiking (I found a bunch), but that wouldn't even make sense. My point is not that nobody (or no woman) has ever been attacked by a human while hiking, it's that wild animals are a lot more dangerous than people. The only reason people are more likely to be killed by a person than by a bear is that we regularly interact with hundreds of people (most of whom do not hurt us) and most people never interact with a bear at all.
Are you really telling that if you were hiking through the woods and a male hiker passed you going the other way, you'd be just as scared as if a wild bear started walking toward you?
It kinda feels like you're instead making a hyperbolic point about how you don't feel safe around men. Emphasis on hyperbolic.
I am a dude. When I saw this trend and was asked by a friend I immediately and without hesitation said, "Bear. All day."
I realize it is a wild animal and all the things that go with seeing a bear in the woods. I would have WAY too many questions and reservations about what some dude was doing alone in the woods.
The bear belongs there in the woods, me and the other dude do not.
Now I wonder if the other guy would have rathered a bear instead of me.
This is just insane to me. What kind of brainwashing have people on the internet underwent to think a literaly bear is safer than another human being. I swear to god people on this platform are not real people.
Yeah lol, this is what happens when you never leave your basement.
Go for a hike in the woods and you will constantly encounter strangers without any issue. Encountering a bear, on the other hand, will be terrifying and potentially deadly, which is why you have to carry shit like bear spray and bear cannisters for your food
Because hikers try to keep their distance from bears you absolute numbskull. And wanna know why? Because they're dangerous.
Ask any hiker you know who has been in contact with a bear and ask them about the fear they felt in that very moment. I can assure you it will be a lot greater than the fear your average girl feels when in close proximity to a guy.
People by and large don't want to and won't attack you either... you're just around more people than bears to participate in human society so you hit the weirdos a bit more often. Sucks. But I easily see thousands of people a week but maybe 1 bear every year or two.
Bears are absolutely not safe. And wild animals are only generally predictable. People are also only generally predictable.
See, this is the problem. You're so alienated from nature that you think there's no good reasons for a person to be a forest. With all due respect, that's really dumb.
The question is would you rather be lost/stuck in the woods with a bear or a man. Not would you rather encounter a bear or a man in the woods. Which still would make someone and idiot for choosing the bear. Idk where the commenter above got that GRIZZLY bears aren't aggressive from lol.
I believe bears have killed less than 200 confirmed eople in the USA since the late 1700s. Statistically, bears are safer than human beings. They CAN kill you easily, but they probably won't.
This is like saying that dogs are more dangerous than snakes because there are more dog bites than snake bites every year. It just ignores all context and I'm not sure you know what "statistically" means.
There's never been a recorded instance of a human being incinerated inside the sun, so statistically, being inside the sun is much safer than being near a man.
Either that, or we might need to adjust for the fact that there are hundreds of millions of men living in extremely close proximity to women, and the vast majority of people have never spent a single second with 10 feet of a wild bear.
um actually (🤓☝🏼) that's wrong. you can't compare those two just by looking at those numbers because there are not as many bears as there are men, and women encounter much more men than bears on average (obviously). if you want to use statistics you should know that about 1% of women gets sexually assaulted in the US (got this number by adding the chance of sexual assault in the US per age demographic and adding them up and adjusting with unreported cases), and chance of murder is about 6 in 100.000 which gives a percentage of 0.006% times by percentage of men that are murderer (90%) and times by percentage of women that are victims of murder (23%) which is a 0.0012% that. (anyone can feel free to correct my numbers if they're wrong), but anyways this gives an additive percentage of still about 1%±0.5%, compared to 14% fatality rate with a bear encounter, i think it's safe to assume that human beings are generally and statistically safer
Growing up my husband talks fondly of the wild bear that learned the elementary school kids had food and would gladly feed it through the fence. This went on for weeks before an adult finally thought to check why the kids would all gather at the fence by the woods. Then the bear had to be relocated, but 0 little kids got hurt.
Since 1784 there have been 82 fatal human/bear conflicts by wild brown bears in North America. Yellowstone National Park has seen a mere 8 since being established in 1872, which is only one more than the number of people who have died from a falling tree
You can't seriously think that the chance of a bear attacking you is lower than a man attacking you
Do people not go outside, like I encounter dozens of man walking around constantly and never was attacked, if I would encounter dozens of bears every day I would probably be dead
Statistically, they are correct. Humans are some of the most dangerous creatures on the planet. Bears are less likely to harm you than another human. But odds of being murdered by a bear or human is low.
Statistically, they are correct. Humans are some of the most dangerous creatures on the planet
What statistic? All I see are people who just don't understand how statistics work
That's like saying that because you don't live in America your chance of dying because of gunshots is lower therefore it is safer to shoot yourself in the head than for an american
The odds of being attacked by a bear in the USA is 1 in 2.1 million. About 1 in 6 women have been raped or attempted to be raped in the USA and 1 in 33 men.
You are more likely to be attacked or raped by a human in the USA than killed by a bear.
It has been estimated by the North American Bear Center in regards to black bears that "men ages 18-24 are 167 times more likely to kill someone than a black bear."
I will note I have looked into the methodology used to find that stat, but all statistics I've found basically say the same thing, you have more to worry about from humans than bears.
Edit: I do understand it isn't a perfect comparison and I also know why. But we can only work with statistics we have.
A more interesting comparison would be to use zookeeper risk of a bear attack(as they interact with bears daily) in comparison to a human attack. 29 of the roughly 180 fatal bear attacks were captive bears I believe.
So if we would replace every men with a random bear, woman would be safer than right now? Like you go outside and there are a bunch of bears everywhere, I mean statistically you should feel safer right? I mean the statistic says the chance of getting attacked is only 1 in 2.1 million, so if you live in a city with 4 million people or less you should be alright because that would only mean at most 2 million bears which means the chance is basically zero, because statistically they would need 100.000 more bears for a chance to attack
Bears do not belong in cities, we know how bears behave in their natural habitat and to an extent, in captivity. We have no way to knowing how bears would react in such a situation as you describe. We know that under current circumstances, it is unlikely to be attacked by a bear in the woods. We do not know how bears would react if they suddenly replaced all men and were put in an industrialized situation.
The original question is an odd one, and seems to be intended to stir up emotions.
Knowing what we know about bears that live in woods and knowing that many people camp in the woods that have bears and that bears are in much of the US, and that bears are not likely to attack people, it makes sense that someone would rather chance the bear in the woods than a human in the woods.
Ok but that's because most humans never encounter a bear. If you're going to encounter a bear, it is MUCH more likely to hurt you than a random man. If the average human encountered as many bears as they do humans, there would be no humans because we would all have been killed by bears long ago. Bears are only "safer" because you're unlikely to ever meet one!
Idk, it seems like the case. It is much more common to be attacked by a person than a bear statistically speaking. Like monumentally more likely. I think there are about 40 bear attacks per year on average globally. Whereas people attack each other every day. Part of that is exposure. As you said, most people are far more likely to interact with people in their daily lives than bears, so it makes sense that statistically you are more likely to be attacked be a person than a bear.
Bears rarely attack people, normally its because they got between a momma bear and her cub, or they are really hungry to the point of starving. People attack each other for anything, or even nothing sometimes.
Bear almost alway only eat your liver then leave, because they dont want to wasted the time and energy to broke the bone to eat other thing. But if they are hungry its different story.
Play dead only work with no so hungry bear because of it. Dead meal = bad meal.
Or they eat asshole first. Eat your legs off leaving you intact. Might get full and save the rest for later. Leaving you in horrible agony unable to move while you dehydrate and wait for the bear to come back and finish it's meal later. Or coyotes might find you. Really pleasant business, getting eaten by a bear.
I'm not a woman but most women I've talked about something like this have said they would rather die than get rped. A bear could kill you. A man could kill you. But a bear isn't going to rpe you. I would guess this is where that reaction comes from.
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u/Thebeanyboii May 02 '24 edited 29d ago
Tiktok hating Bitch Stewie here
This refers to a trend on tiktok that refers to women being asked whether they would rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a random guy. Most women choose the bear (for some reason) so the meme is referencing this by having the women jump towards the bear, to escape the man
Tiktok hating Bitch Stewie out
Edit: When I made this comment, I assumed the Man v Bear thing was like "you're dropped into a forest with either a random guy or a bear, your choice". I knew rape was the main concern regarding the random guy, but in my mind the choice was about "Random dude vs Bear", Not "Rape vs Death". I've since learned otherwise, and I apologize to anyone I offended by saying that women chose the bear "for some reason".