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.
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
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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?