Blue Collar Scientist

Yet 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.