- “I thought I was about to get laid and eat some delicious peanut butter, but instead all I found was a mouthful of nylon and this weird plastic monkey. Thanks for the bait and switch, science dick.”
PART I: PREDATOR SHIELD™
The other night, on the cable television (which is mine as of three weeks ago! Three magical weeks!), I took a break from Degrassi: The Next Generation (one can only go there for so many consecutive hours) to watch a Discovery Channel program entitled Bear Feeding Frenzy. Bear Feeding Frenzy is about a man who, for the purposes of science, fashions a tent out of smoked salmon, dunks it in sexy she-bear urine, puts a peanut-butter-smeared humannequin inside, then leaves the whole thing in the middle of a heavily populated bear sanctuary, thus irrefutably proving that bears have an insatiable appetite for human flesh. It’s science! As the bears devour the tent, the man sits several feet away in a small plastic cube (or, as it’s known in science, PREDATOR SHIELD™), yelling things like, “BOY, BEARS SURE DO WANT TO EAT HUMAN FLESH,” and “THE ONLY WAY OUT OF HERE IS THROUGH A GRIZZLY’S COLON!” and “IF IT WEREN’T FOR THE PREDATOR SHIELD™ AND THE FACT THAT I AM NOT MADE OF PEANUT BUTTER AND FISH INNARDS, THESE BEARS WOULD WASTE NO TIME IN GOBBLING ME FOR SURE.” He also discovers that bears, unlike himself, do not enjoy trail mix.
That whole experience led me to hunger for real knowledge about bear attacks (is my family safe!!!??!?!?!?!?!), which led me to the life-changing Wikipedia page List of fatal bear attacks in North America (by decade). Oh. Oh. Ohhhhhhh. Make your way to this page posthaste. (IF YOU ARE NOT A COWARD AND/OR MADE OF FISH INNARDS!)
It is a sad place, and horrific, and fascinating. A sample (click to enlarge):
As far as I can discern, contrary to what Bear Feeding Frenzy would have me believe, a bear will only eat you if: 1. You get too close to its baybay, 2. You get too close to its moose carcass, 3. You keep it in a concrete pen and throw dog food at it. Do not do these things, and you will not experience the sinking feeling that comes with a bear’s hot mouth closing on your face.
(Coming tomorrow: Part II: Kesagake!)
Looks like Old Two Toes left this world one point ahead.
They can smell your menses!
please Stranger, if you ever have to fire all your staff, except for one, please keep Lindy. her slog posts are hilarious.
I live in Alaska and am an avid trail runner. As such I find myself in the vicinity of bears nearly every day. I see their tracks and their poop all the time but how many times have I actually seen a bear in all of my time spent out on the trail? ZERO! I saw the wikipedia list earlier this summer when I was trying to determine whether or not I should be frightened of bears. I determined that bears want to eat me about as much as I want to eat them…which is not at all. Earlier in the summer I spent two weeks on Kodiak Island camped out and working in the company of two grizzly bears. Most of the time they ignored us and went about their business which included playing, splashing in the lake, grazing, and lots of adorable sleeping and cuddling.
I am an expert in the field of Ursine-Astrology and if you know any bears that need a horoscope or their charts done, please have them contact me. Thank you.
for lindy: http://helpabeariseatingme.com/
Careful with your bear generalizations. What’s true for a black may probably isn’t true for a griz.
To say nothing of a polar bear.
A polar bear might just hunt you down and eat you because it has always wondered what people taste like.
In bear country, I strongly recommend that you do not smell like anything a bear might be interested in, whether that’s food, blood, toothpaste, or something else. And sometimes even that won’t be enough where grizzlies or polar bears are concerned:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/advent…
This bear post has put me in mind of a movie I saw late Sunday night on the SciFi channel: Savage Planet.
Explorers travel to a planet full of stock footage of bears. It was incredible. There are some representative samples on Youtube, it’s incredible.
Alaskan here. I am pretty scared of bears because, especially living up here, you hear a lot of scary bear stories about people who “did everything right” and got gnawed on nonetheless.
The way I figure it though, bears are like people when it comes to encounters. Most people are well-meaning, but we all know for a fact that there are some psychos out there. Most bears are just living average bear lives (couldn’t help myself), but when the occasional crazy ass bear eats somebody, we shouldn’t take it as a sign that all bears are killers anymore than we should take a human murder as a sign that the apocalypse draweth nigh.
Try going camping, smoking some pot and reading from the book “Bear Attacks,” by some professor in BC.
He reconstructs the death of various people in grizzly attacks, he’s like the forensic expert of North America who’s always called out to the scene of death including the autopsy of the bear who usually gets shot then they download the contents of the bear’s stomach, which often includes an arm or face, etc.
In every case he manages to blame the human who has become bear chow; we always seem to yell when we should play dead and play dead when we should yell. He’s got a great tsk tsk tone.
“Cynthia’s fatal mistake was to think the bear was searching for food when in fact she had surprised the bear….meaning that by yelling she only inspired the beat to attack…”
Quite an adrenaline rush, and a fun game to see who can sleep afterwards.
This reminds me of that Montana tourism ad with a bear running down an empty highway. Really, Montana? I prefer my highways bear free, thank you very much. And if you expect me to just be driving alongside a bear for the duration of my vacay, you’ve got another thing coming.
The phrase “dragged out of a tent at night” is going to keep me awake on every future camping trip of my life. THANKS FOR THAT.
Kinda unrelated, but did anyone else know that WA state has grizzlies? ‘Cause we totally do. Very few, but they’re out there.
Damn, bears are cool.
(bear safety: http://www.nps.gov/noca/naturescience/be&hellip😉
(grizzlies! http://www.conservationnw.org/northcasca&hellip😉
You know, if Charles Mudede and Lindy West had a baby together, it would be a baby with a horribly misshapen head and red eyes, and it would shoot laser beams out of its eyes, but, unfortunately, they wouldn’t be high powered laser beams that burned shit, they would just be little red dots. Little red dots everywhere.
lindy you’re my favorite and a good part of the reason i read slog/stranger
Turns out there is also a list of fatal shark attacks on Wiki. Who knew? Nothing on turtle attacks, however. WTF?
At least one of the listed attacks is a fake…a cover up for a murder.
“Darcy [Staver] was killed by her husband, he then left her to be partially consumed by a small Black Bear to cover up the murder. He is now serving a life sentence for first degree murder. His cover-up story was that Darcy was killed by a small black bear after retreating to the roof of her cabin to escape the bear’s break-in to their cabin west of Glennallen, Alaska.”
The story went everywhere at first because it was used as a reason to tell menstruating women to stay out of the woods. Turns out he knocked her skull in and spread a little bacon grease to get a bear to eat her. It is still hard to find the real story. I am always skeptical of a husband-wife story when a bear kills the wife, but not the husband.
@15 ftw
Lindy and Jonathan Golob make the Stranger tolerable to those of us of the straight persuasion…
Humor and intelligence blended to a fine mix
@18: Amen to that!