Always hard to pass a judgement on things one didn't witness...I read through the newspaper story; so apparently that dude thought a bear rug might be nice in the livingroom when he saw the bear fishing.Originally Posted by Gray Wolf
The thing is just with surprise bear encounters, as this ended up being in the end, people let themselves be ruled by fear. If you have bearspray instead of a gun, in the vast majority of cases both you and the bear get to tell the tale because it is extremely rare that a bear wants to kill and eat you. They want to be left alone and prefer their personal space without people, just as people don't want bears getting too close into their personal space. Bears will either turn and run if a person gets to close to them, stand their ground, slowly approach to bully that person aout of the way, or bluff charge.
People who carry a gun will most likely shoot a bear who because of their utter ignorance of bear behaviour and language scares them, and this guy was lucky that he managed to kill the bear. A lot of times what happens is that the bear is wounded, and even if severely wounded, THAT is when they will get seriously ticked off and THEN they mean business and want to do you harm because their survival is at stake.
So yes, that bear was only 30 feet away and approaching, sounds to me (without knowing what sort of body and vocal language he was displaying) that he either wanted to check the guys out or was still fairly politely asking them to get out of his way.
But since the guy had already figured before that such a big bear would best be shot dead and give great bragging rights, I suppose he wouldn't have been interested in letting it get on with its life anyway.
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