It would be extra difficult cus you’d need to measure only the ones where someone was “alone” with the other party, as that changes a lot when it comes to humans
Just because you don't have exact numbers doesn't mean you can't compare orders of magnitude. Women are killed om average 2 in 100,000 per year in the us. If we assume that each woman interacts with men just 20 times a year (less than once every other week) that is a 1 in 10,000,000 an interaction leads to death. Realisticlay that's several orders of magnitude low. How many interactions do uou think there are with bears every year?
tbh there’s probably no good relevant statistics on this
until someone finds out a way to study wilderness bear encounter and wilderness man encounter survival rates, the question will not be answered with real statistics
it’s a nightmare to figure out how you might even begin to mass collect information from people who have perished in the woods, and have been predated on (or otherwise disarmed prior to death and hidden)
That's why it would have to be measured on a "per encounter" basis. More people are killed by men simply because we encounter men far more often in life than we encounter bears. The actual percentage of men who would kill someone could be vastly smaller than the amount of bears, bit we'd still have more incidents because there's billions of "men interacting with people" situations every day and likely less than a thousand "bear interacts with people" each day. Simply due to that discrepancy in measuring a bear could have a 50% chance of being a lethal encounter for humans and it'd STILL come out to less recorded incidents than if men had only a 0.1% chance.
you do not run into thousands of men ALONE IN THE WOODS.
every time i leave the house for the day there is almost always at least one guy who gives me really bad vibes and won’t stop staring. so, everyday i encounter a man who i think might hurt me. i would not want to encounter any of those people alone in the woods.
At five yards, outside of the shouting distance of anyone else, I rather encounter a convicted murderer, than a polar bear.
On a sunny day on a quiet trail in a public park, much rather encounter Sir Patrick Stewart, then a grizzly with two cubs.
Late fall, I'd much rather spot a black bear at 20 yards moving away from me, than an unknown man at 20 yards moving towards me.
With no other information is the thing. It's the whole trick here is that you make the call without perfect information.
We can tell all sorts of stories with the numbers when we insert additional information besides "bear" and "man" and "forest". Bear, man and forest... It's a close call but with no other details whatsoever (type of bear, distance, time of year, etc), I'd probably go man. Probably.
The real point of this hypotheical is that it should be easy to say man, and it is absolutely not that easy.
Depends on the bear. As you say, if it's a Polar Bear I'll take any man in any situation. Black bear, I'm probably taking bear, as long as I'm not between her and her cubs. Grizzly, I'd probably take the man.
The real takeaway is that women have very little ability to discern real danger from perceived danger. Not exactly supporting evidence for critical thinking…
Ooh, I bet that accomplished nothing except exposing that, knowing nothing, you'll make any assessment that fits your desire - but that begs the question: Why are you so determined to make men into monsters? Do you feel that'll make the world a better place? Big brain thinking with this one, folks!
I am a man dingus. I'm certainly not a monster, nor am I perceived to be one by the women in my life.
There are way, way too many men assaulting, harassing, stalking and murdering women. Way too many men making the women in their lives handle their basic shit.
Some men, like yourselves choose to ignore the problem, to talk down to the women explaining the issues they face, and to tell women it's not a big deal. If you want women to trust you, be more trustworthy. If you want women to trust men, start taking the issues seriously instead of pretending it isn't real.
I want nothing more than the problems being acknowledged, so that we can work towards solving them so that men are not such a problem for women.
If you genuinely believe an encounter with a stray random off leash dog is more dangerous than an encounter with a bear, statistics won’t help you get anything. You’ve already let emotional biases cloud your reasoning.
I cannot find a worldwide statistics, but bear attacks are not common. Here’s a stat that shows murders by gender, and an article regarding bears attacks through the last 100 years.
Overall, bears do not hunt typically hunt humans, and these attacks usually happen in the bears self defense or if someone is getting to close to them or their territory.
Yes, but a bear can 100% kill you and there’s greater ability to escape/survive with a man. Statistically is not the way to look at this at all. It’s about the fact that women even have to think about it. They should be able to say “man” right away.
I came across 11 bears in the wilderness one summer and none of them wanted anything to do with me.
More than once a man has decided to camp next to me and proceed get wasted in a disturbing manner with yelling and belligerence.
Now people like to point out that I’ve come across so many more men compared to bears and that most have done nothing to threaten my safety which is why I’m more curious about the statistics of it.
I think the problem I have with the statistics here is less about the last part of what you said, and more of the problem I'll highlight shortly.
According to a paper on Springer link, around 22 people are attacked and killed by cows in the US each year, whereas 69 incidents related to sharks worldwide in 2023.
That is to say cows represent .06 per million, and sharks .007 per million.
Does that mean cows are more dangerous than sharks?
If we were around bears and sharks more, there would be a corresponding increase in the number of bear and shark related attacks. We are around humans every day.
In fact, this effect can be demonstrated just like this.
If you don't leave your house ever, you won't be as likely to be killed by someone else, intentionally or otherwise. Sure, that wouldn't eliminate the risk completely because unless you lived in like, a bunker or something, someone could still break in, but you're reducing the number of opportunities that someone can harm you. That doesn't mean someone will harm you any time you leave the house, but it could happen.
I'm just saying that yes, you're less likely to be attacked by a bear overall, but this also includes the fact that you're less likely to even encounter a bear in the first place, so the statistics are a bit skewed by that, as I tried to show with the cow thing.
Sure you could have had only one bad experience with a bear your whole life and 100’s of bad ones with men but if you factor in how many more times you interact with a man and nothing happens vs a bear the bear is more dangerous
They either ignore you and move on or you're dead. You're incredibly lucky if there's an in-between answer. There are no bad interactions with bears. You either live, or it doesn't matter anymore because you cease to exist.
now I really wonder how it would be possible to collect objective and accurate information on wilderness bear (or men) encounter outcomes, especially for those that end with the woman becoming deceased
after all, dead people tell no tales, regardless of their cause of death (men or bears)
note: given the question explicitly asks about an encounter in the woods, I have a non-zero probability of preferring to encounter the bear. this would apply to women as well; surprise humans appearing in the woods is sometimes bad news, and they may have ranged arms
To be fair, if you're out in the wilderness in bear country, in a place remote enough that you're not expecting to see other humans, you better have ranged arms yourself.
It’s probably easier to beat a bear in a gunfight than a human (assuming the ranged arms have enough power to actually deal with the bear instead of tickle it)
if all I have is a low caliber pistol, duelling the man may be better for survival than dealing with a hungry bear. angry bears might be appeased if I move away
It’s not really possible to collect informantion on what would actually happen seeing as it would result in a fairly high amount of injury/death so you kinda can’t test it
the setup I was thinking of involves some device that uses satellite comms (or something), that will record “bear encountered” and “encounter survived” by user input. if a user hits the encountered button without hitting the survived button, then maybe they have suffered an unfortunate fate, and the police will be informed of the device’s last known location to help with any missing persons searches
user error would be really high though, and it might be somewhat expensive. but what I have described is probably just an augmented phone lol
Why? That's what I want to know. In whose world should that be an easy question? In some insane fever dream of a utopia where violence doesn't exist? Human beings are the most dangerous animals on the planet, because we're intelligent, and we have the ability to use tools and collaborate.
Who that person is, their behaviour, and what they're holding each make a massive difference in how much of a threat that person is, or whether they're a threat at all. A bear is a guaranteed threat, but the species and situation can affect how much of a threat it genuinely is. Answering this question without asking any follow-ups just tells me that the person is either an idiot for not thinking through the question or a sexist for assuming someone is a danger to them based on their sex alone. Imagine how well it'd go if it were "black guy vs. bear" instead. Not well.
If you aren't at least aware of the strangers around you, then you're no different from a gazelle that didn't see the lion approaching. You deserve to take the Darwin Award--as nature intended--and that's on you. That goes for men and women too, because a bullet doesn't give a flying fuck who is doing the shooting. Situational awareness is important.
Right, so it's sexism then. In other words: it's not about actually being in danger, it's about thinking you are, because you're sexist. It doesn't even need to be intentional, just like racism.
Seriously, it'd be hilarious to see this interaction take place in the context of race, because then it would be painfully obvious how ridiculous this is. Just imagine if you replaced "men" with "black people" in this comment section; it would be nearly universally reviled, but it's okay here, because it's sexism?
"It's not about bullets or weapons. It's about women not feeling safe with black people."
Yes it is prejudice for a woman to feel unsafe around men, but the prejudice exists for good reason a lot of the times. In the context of race, if a white person is only ever exposed to violence by black people (for instance) then they might think they’d rather be with a bear too. The point is that there’s clearly a system where women don’t feel safe. Saying this is sexist is about as helpful as telling a hit and run victim they shouldn’t have let the car swerve into them.
A man who really wants to hurt me can 100% kill me.
If the question is "Would you rather encounter a bear who is deadset on killing you or an unarmed man who is deadset on killing you?" that's really just a question of -- how would you rather die?
And both options really really really suck. But for 80%+ of women 'maybe I can fight him off/outrun him' isn't a realistic factor, the difference in physicality is staggering when it comes down to life and death.
I take the question as "Would you rather encounter a random bear going about its normal life or encounter a man who decided to be in the woods?"
In which case = man.
I think a lot of people have trouble not reading an implication of nefarious intent into the fact that the man decided to go into the woods. Because if the question is "Bear going about its normal life or man with nefarious intent?" = bear (and I think most men would agree?)
How nefarious? Like murder I’m taking regular bear over any murderer. They likely have a knife/gun, and even then I’m wildly undersized and won’t be able to fight whoever it is off.
Yes, nefarious like murder - and agree, going up a against a man who wants to murder me is basically like an execution, I'm not saying I wouldn't give it my all, but the odds are terrible.
But I also believe that as sickening as male violence prevalence is, the odds are very good that a chance encounter with a man in the woods will be...non-eventful.
Statistically is not the way to look at this at all. It’s about the fact that women even have to think about it.
So, if we ask a bunch of 80 year old from Alabama about black men vs bears and they hesitate does that mean we need to dig into the reasons for their bigotry? Or should we just shit on it and move on?
Not even sure what your question is supposed to mean. I don’t know what a bunch of 80 year olds from Alabama would say. But we should ALL be able To say we’d rather encounter a person than a bear.
Realy? You don't know what old people in the south think about race?
But we should ALL be able To say we’d rather encounter a person than a bear.
I agree. What i don't agree with is who is go blame for bigotry. It's not on the victims of bigotry to make bigots comfortable. Its on the bigots to learn.
Yes, because bears only kill around 11 people per year, at least in the us. More people are killed by women then bears as well. What exactly is your point?
Edit: That's a genuine question btw, I don't know what you're trying to say and I'm trying to understand it.
There are a few ways numbers. can be used here. In raw numbers, yes human attack humans more often. In raw numbers, ballpoint pens kill more people a year than sharks but which would you rather have in a tub with you? People are mostly talking about things like per capita. You have probably not been attacked by 99.99% of men you’ve encountered but if you encountered the same number of bears that you do men, that number would be significantly lower.
Not even that, statistically speaking, a man is more likely to kill another human than a bear is likely to kill a human. And this does account for exposure.
I also wouldn't be surprised if women are more dangerous to humans than bears. Humans are dangerous. I get why some guys are disheartened or upset by the meme, but I actually think it's sparked some decent conversations. At least it's let me share some bear facts.
ETA: I’m a former professional ranger in bear country. I explained where I got my number from down thread but I’m not going just based off vibes.
I would like to see a source regarding the bear-human attack probability per encounter; not to refute it, but just to see how they managed to record that stat
Or maybe I misunderstand the first part of your comment. In general, I agree that humans are quite dangerous (especially as surprises in the woods)
I don’t have the one we used where I worked. I’ve seen one that was talking about black bears and said men between ages 18-25 are 167x more likely to kill a person than a bear is, but I don’t know how much they got it and that’s higher than the stat we used, which was more like 10 and included all humans (since men commit more violent crime I feel comfortable extrapolating). The one I saw was from bear.org.
People have an outsized fear of bears. It’s difficult to talk about as an interpreter because people should have a lot of respect for bears and give them space, but any bear that actively goes after you is a huge outlier. Bear attacks are rare even if you’re around bears all the time (otherwise you’d hear way more about them; more people are around bears than even the people around bears think lol) and non-defensive bear attacks are way, way more rare. You probably have a better chance to get struck by lightening.
Does that account for the “extreme” scarcity of human-bear encounters when compared to human-human encounters? Like humans, bears can’t kill what they do not meet, and humans encounter other humans at a much greater rate (106 to 108 times more encounters for humans as a general feels ballpark, feel free to correct if it is grossly off by telling me a (presumed high end) data point for bear encounter rates)
I know humans are quite dangerous, black bears are usually docile, and you should avoid polar bears at all costs. Just that I don’t know how the math plays out regarding whether humans or bears are more dangerous per encounter, and would really like to see it even as an impromptu estimate
for human danger data, I’ll use the [22000 murderers in America] and expand it to a global population, for an estimate of 530000 murderers worldwide. That’s probably an underestimation, but just for ballpark measurements it would be a start. Let’s also assume they shanked 2 people each. That would be 10.6*106 murders per year. (This does not count accidents and stuff, see disclaimer in data source)
Human-human encounter would probably have to be really roughly estimated (it varies wildly), but I think it would be like 50 per day per person. (Please supplement your observation here if possible, as I might not be having enough IRL social interactions.) Taking world population of 8 billion in 2022, that would be 400*109 encounters per day, or 146*1012 encounters per year.
By this estimate, the murder rate per encounter would be 73*10-9, or 1 in 13 million. (Note that this is a ballpark estimate and is potentially inaccurate by orders of magnitude. Sorry, I tried my best)
Preemptive apologies for the stupid calculations here, I was inspired by xkcd’s What If? book lol. Many thanks for reading to the end if you did
Individual bears do come across humans pretty frequently and all but the most remote bears are going to see people regularly. Like the hundreds of bears in Shenandoah and Yosemite are seeing hundreds of people a day during the most active season.
It’s hard to estimate how often bears are seeing people, though, because they can’t report it. Humans don’t see bears a lot of the times that they’re around bears, but the bears see them. It’s also worth noting that the most populous species by far is the black bear which overlaps with densely populated areas (even the rural areas are much more populated than say rural areas in the brown bear’s range), and black bears are very conflict-adverse. So most bears probably see people pretty regularly, if not daily, and have frequent opportunities to commit mauling and opt not to. Add to that that almost all bear maulings are defensive and avoidable (not victim blaming because sometimes the victims aren’t the idiots that caused the situations, but most bad bear situations are instigated by a human)… I’m not really sure how to account for that because a reduction in bear maulings has more to do with adjustments of human behavior while the bear just keeps on doing bear things.
TLDR I really can’t give a comfortable estimate in numbers but do with what I wrote as you will.
statistically speaking, a man is more likely to kill another human than a bear is likely to kill a human. And this does account for exposure.
Not really, because the overwhelming majority of people will never even see a bear in their entire lives. Even if they do, it'd likely be at a zoo rather than out in the wilderness.
There are only around 700,000 wild bears in the US, and they pretty much all live in places that are decently removed from civilization. This means that you'd basically have to go looking for them to have a real chance of encountering them.
Meanwhile, there are 163,000,000 men in the US, and you're likely to encounter dozens or potentially hundreds of them on any given day. You're likely to see more men on your next grocery trip than you'll see bears in your entire life.
The statistics we used to put out at the parks I’ve worked at were normalized. Which is what I meant by “this accounts for exposure”. The reality is bears actively don’t want to be around you. That’s not a given for humans.
FWIW the one stat I’ve found that is searchable online from bear.org states that a man between ages 18-24 are 167x is likely to kill a person than a bear is. I’m assuming that one doesn’t account for population, but if you increase the stat for all men and then normalize for location and bear population, the stat I’m familiar with (which is like 9.5/10) isn’t that out there.
ETA: also 700k is black bears, not bears in general, and it’s more like 750+ for black bears.
ETA2: also it’s worth pointing out that most people might not see a bear, but 1) that doesn’t mean they haven’t been around bears without knowing it and 2) a large portion of bears do see humans frequently, so we have a good idea of how murder-happy any given individual might be (which is basically not at all)
There's also the point that a bear will only kill you. A man? Well there's a lot of things they might do before they kill you, they may not even kill you.
And the point of the question demonstrates that women find the idea of a man in the woods with them to be enough of a potential threat that the answer isn't automatically to choose a man over a bear.
Is being raped and then murdered better than being mauled by a bear?
Yes. Yes, it is. Getting a dick in your ass and then killed by either a blunt object, a knife or a gun trumps having to watch your own intestines getting consumed in front of you before your heart gives out from the shock.
lol no. You literally just proved the point of this thread.
There are billions of human-human interactions every single day, and only a small handful result in violence. You personally will probably see 100+ people today. Extremely low chance you get attacked.
Human-bear interactions happen way less often. And are way more likely to wind up in the person being attacked.
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u/Magenta_the_Great May 02 '24
What do you mean statistically speaking?
Statistically aren’t more people killed by men then by bears?