More Evidence on Bear Spray
Posted on March 26th, 2008 by blue collar scientistYet another in a series of scientific studies has shown that bear spray is significantly more likely to stop bear aggression than a firearm - and it was conducted using encounter data exclusively from Alaska. The study, called Efficacy of Bear Deterrent Spray in Alaska, overturns the conventional wisdom that a gun is necessary in bear country, and is published in the April issue of Journal of Wildlife Management.
The study reports that bear spray stopped aggression 92% of the time with brown bears, 90% on black bears, and 100% on polar bears (warning: for polar bears, n=2, so you wouldn’t want to bank on that result). Of the total sample of 175 people involved in the bear spray incidents, only three were injured, in each case minor injuries that did not require hospitalization. Self-inflicted injuries from bear spray affected 12 people; ten of them with minor irritation and two of them with temporary near-incapacitation.
ScienceDaily reports on some data from a previous study: that firearm use stops bear aggression in only 67% of cases. There’s no data on self-inflicted firearms injuries or their severity, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they were less frequent but more severe than with spray. Most if not all of the self-inflicted gunshot wounds I have heard about from the nearby Chugach have been people carrying firearms for bear protection.
The study also debunks two myths: that spray doesn’t work in the wind, and that the can might malfunction. The wind issue is at least a legitimate concern, but the study found that in actual encounters, in windy conditions, the spray still deterred bears.
As for the spray can malfunctioning - they found zero malfunctions in their sample of data. And I consider the argument a bit silly to begin with. I enjoy shooting a good deal, and I’ve had a few dud rounds and gun jams since I started shooting as a teenager. I even fired a .45 squib round about 15 years ago. But I can’t recall ever having a spray can malfunction just when I needed it, even though I’ve been using them a lot longer, and a lot more frequently.
One other statistic jumped out from the data. The number of times per year that a bear gets close enough to a human to be sprayed in Alaska is only 3. I’m thinking my odds of getting killed by being run over by an ATV are considerably higher than encountering a bear in close quarters. I’m going to continue to not worry unduly about bears.
Tags: Alaska, bear spray, encounter, hiking, injury
March 27th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Would you please explain a) what bear spray consists of — is it just Mace?, b) what a Chugash is?
March 29th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Martin,
Bear spray is essentially mace; it is high-concentration pepper spray in a large spray bottle, about the size of a can of hair spray. When you pull the trigger, all the contents come out in a big fan-shaped cloud in about five seconds.
The Chugach are a local range of mountains; the nearby Kenai Mountains were formed in the same orogeny. The Chugach mountains near Anchorage are part of a popular state park, where a lot of people do their hiking.
Thanks for the reminder that my readership is global - I’ll work on that!
March 30th, 2008 at 12:07 am
I read sloppily: I was pretty sure the Chugach must be indigenous people. (-;
March 30th, 2008 at 12:13 am
Oh, and definitely exploit your exotic locale. Almost anything you write about local conditions will be hugely interesting and exotic to people elsewhere. I mean, “bear spray”, how cool isn’t that? Global news sources hardly ever mention Alaska except in the context of oil spills and global warming.
Have you got a digital camera? I would love to see pix of your world now and then.
My only contact with Alaska was a trashily over-made-up voluptuous co-student when I was an undergrad. She had gotten her wrists ruined by the cold in a fish cannery. Her thesis was originally supposed to treat the possibility that Vikings smoked pot, but then she switched to the Out Of Africa issue.
March 30th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
“I was pretty sure the Chugach must be indigenous people.”
Actually, they are. The mountains are their namesakes. The Chugach can refer to: People, a mountain range, a state park, a national forest, and probably some other things I’m forgetting….
It is no surprise that an Alaskan would be studying pot. There’s a big marijuana-legalization movement here. Yep, I’ve got a digital camera….