Black Bear Attack
So, I am re-watching the movie Backcountry on Netflix, and having consumed nothing but bear attack content for the past week in preparation for a bear safety presentation this morning, y'all are gonna have to listen to me talk about it! (As a quick note: this movie is based off a true story.)
So, first things first: Black bear attacks are incredibly rare. Between 1900 and 2009 in North America there are only 63 recorded deaths by non-captive black bears (Herrero et al. 2011)
However, when they do happen, they're horrific because of the attacks that occurred, about 88% were predatory attacks (Herrero et al. 2011).
So, let's talk about it! With a quick note: the information listed next comes from the podcast Tooth and Claw, hosted by wildlife biologist Wesley Larson, and his brother, and their friend, and from the book Bear Attacks: Their causes and avoidances by Stephen Herrero.
The black bear attack, and the behavior of the bear up until the attack, is actually pretty accurate for what you can expect from a predatory black bear. The movie does a good job representing it. Now, in the movie, there's a few things (read: a lot of things, actually) that the couple the story focuses on did wrong, and I'm gonna take you through them.
1 - They didn't have a map. The main guy feels confident in his navigation and that he can find the way despite having not hiked the trail since he was in high school. In the movie he appears to be late 20's, early 30's, so it's probably been a decade since he hiked the trail. And, even if he'd hiked it yesterday, you should always hike with a map.
2 - One good thing the woman does (Her name is Jenn, I can't remember the guy's name) is that she does carry bear spray! And, at least for the first part of the movie, she does carry it on her hip. This is great! You should hike with bear spray (it's very multipurpose: works on bears, cougars, creepy men who won't stop asking you if you're hiking alone) and when you do, always keep it in the same spot! For example: mine lives on my right shoulder. It's always in that same spot, and when I'm hiking in bear country, I'm always touching it and remembering where it is. However: at one point, their food get's broken into and consumed by the bear. This is not good. We don't need to get into food habituation here, but the TL;DR of food condition is that it equals either a dead bear, dead people, or both. (hint: it's gonna be the second in this one.) So, at this point, Jenn and her boyfriend know they've got bear problems. But for some reason, they don't have the bear spray readily accessible in their tent at night, which means when Jenn's boyfriend opens their tent and sees the bear very close, he doesn't have the bear spray to spray it. He actually asks for his ax. He should ask for the bear spray, and use it first. Also, he should have come busting out of the tent with Jenn with the spray, yelling and screaming and throwing stuff at the bear, and he should have sprayed it right then. However, he doesn't. Which ends up resulting in the bear getting into the tent, grabbing him, killing him and consuming him. When Jenn sprays the bear, it looks like she hits the bear, but it's a little hard to tell, and the bear does come back. That's INCREDIBLY rare. Bear spray is a good deterrent, and actually works better than firearms (that being said: firearms can be a decent back up for if your spray doesn't work. however, they don't make a good first line of defence.)
One thing this movie doesn't do a great job of though is an accurate representation of the speed of a bear. At one point there's what's supposed to be a dramatic chase scene where Jenn runs from and is chased by the bear. Bears can run at 30 - 40 miles per hour. You're not going to out run the bear. And either way, you should never run from a bear because all that's gonna do is tell the bear you're a prey animal, and it should chase you.
So, the TL;DR of a campsite and/or predatory black bear is:
1 - spray it if it gets within 30 feet (10 yards) of you
2- yell, scream, throw things, be aggressive. It's a black bear: it probably wants to eat you.
3 - group up: get together in one group. Of those fatal black bear attacks, 91% occurred on groups of 1 or 2 people (Herrero et al. 2011)
References:
Herrero, S. (2018). Bear attacks: Their causes and avoidance. Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Herrero, S., Higgins, A., Cardoza, J. E., Hajduk, L. I., & Smith, T. S. (2011). Fatal attacks by American black bear on people: 1900–2009. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 75(3), 596–603. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.72
Larson, W. (Executive Producer). (2020 - Present). Tooth and Claw [Audio podcast]. Qcode. https://open.spotify.com/show/5Dyi1niZbQWaPezfiBu2tK