Staying Safe in Bear Country

I recently had the good fortune to hear Stephen Herrero (author of Bear Attacks, Their Causes and Avoidance) at a conference. I was able to ask him about the Yosemite restriction on bear spray. He was not aware of that regulation and seemed surprised. He postulated that perhaps bear spray would be used by visitors to harass bears rather than selectively repel attacks.

He has been involved in producing, along with a consortium of many people, a video titled Staying Safe in Bear Country that was very informative. It proposes that all bear behavior that leads to actual or close contact with humans can be considered as one of three types of actions:
1. curious and exploratory
2. defensive or dominance
3. predatory

With each of these types of behaviors can often be identified by bear actions and should be dealt with differently.
Much of the information in the video is in:
http://www.env.gov.yk.ca/pdf/howyoucanstaysafe.pdf

But the interesting bear movements that help to identify the different types of challenging behavior are best appreciated on the video (information on ordering is at the end of the pdf file).

These behaviors apply to both black bears and grizzly bears, although grizzlies then to be the more aggressive. Professor Herrero suggested that the different evolution of black bears and grizzlies had an important effect on the aggressiveness of these two species. Black bears tended to evolve in forested areas and benefited with better survival by fleeing and climbing trees. Grizzlies evolved in more open plains-type conditions where there was few places to hide and survived better by not fleeing but by larger size and aggression.

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The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
-- Carl Sagan