NOTE: I had to recycle this article, somewhat modified, because it's one of my pet peeves and an endlessly regurgitated Big Lie from the Left that I'm sick and tired of hearing.
When it comes to protecting myself against bears, I personally prefer firearms. I’m not against pepper spray, mind you, which has indeed proven effective on a great many occasions. For people completely unfamiliar with firearms, pepper spray is a sound and effective choice. It certainly offers a great deal more safety and security recreating in grizzly country than waltzing around completely unarmed.
I do believe, however, that all of the supposedly empirical “proof” of its effectiveness has been grossly distorted and highly over-rated to the point that it gives people a dangerous false sense of security.
Some time ago, I ran across an on-line gun article which said, “Alternatively, 97% of bears are stopped with a 9oz. can of bear spray. Yep, I said it, bear spray. Comparing the percentages, a firearm should actually be carried as a second line of defense should the bear spray prove ineffective…I am a believer in math, so ‘I know’ that statistically the odds of survival will favor me should I choose the Bear Spray.”
Similarly, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service puts out a “Fact Sheet” entitled Bear Spray vs. Bullets. It makes such claims as, “…persons encountering grizzlies and defending themselves with firearms suffer injury about 50% of the time.” And, “…a person’s chance of incurring serious injury from a charging grizzly doubles when bullets are fired versus when bear spray is used.”
A recent letter to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ Montana Outdoors magazine again repeated the famous 97% effectiveness claim on pepper spray, but upped to ante on firearms to you having a 57% chance of getting killed or mauled when using one as defense against bears.
If such was actually the case, the white man never would have made it west of the Mississippi and the Lewis and Clark Expedition would have suffered 100% casualties before they got to Great Falls.
Well, the advocates cannot possibly be wrong, since they have science and math to prove it, right? As the old saying goes, “Figures don’t lie.” That rather depends on the numbers, how they were garnered, and by whom. There are other old adages which are also apropos, such as, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” And my personal favorite: “Torture numbers and they will confess to anything.”
Although the pepper spray advocates always say studies or even numerous studies prove the effectiveness of bear spray, when you seek out this plethora of studies (plural) they pretty much boil down into a single study (singular) that has appeared in a couple of different forms. The 2012 study that started it all was researched primarily by BYU professor Tom Smith and author Stephen Herrero and published in the Journal of Wildlife Management under the title of “Efficacy of Bear Deterrent Spray in Alaska.”
Mankind has been taking out bears with “modern” firearms (loosely defined as ones using self-contained cartridge ammunition) for about a hundred and fifty years, but pepper spray is a comparatively new invention. In wide-spread use for only a couple of decades, it is naturally more difficult to find and compile incidents in which bear spray has been used.
The authors found 72 cases of pepper spray use to include in the study. It is interesting to note that out of these 72 cases, 30% involved government personnel engaged in “bear management activities”, only 25 of the bears were considered aggressive, and just 10 cases involved actual bear charges and/or attacks. The majority dealt with curious or non-aggressive bears. On the other hand, 100% of the 197 bear vs. gun incidents chosen for the study involved aggressive bears and actual bear charges and attacks.
Consider that the researchers found fewer than 200 incidents of bear attacks involving guns in Alaska over a 126-year period to counter-balance the pepper spray accounts. Nor were these incidents random samples; they were deliberately, carefully, and selectively cherry-picked.
A little digging found a 1999 study conducted by the Alaska Department of Fish & Game (Miller & Tutterrow) entitled Characteristics of Nonsport Mortalities to Brown and Black Bears and Human Injuries From Bears in Alaska. This study documented 2,289 cases within the State of Alaska of people using firearms to defend themselves and/or their property against bears during the period from 1970 to 1996. In this study, fewer than 2% of the incidents involved injuries to humans. One summary noted, “Most of the people shooting brown or black bears in DLP (Defense of Life or Property) circumstances indicated that no human injury occurred (98.5% for brown bears and 99.2% for black bears).”
Percentage-wise, that comes to only 1.15% of those who used firearms against bears being injured. That’s a helluva long way from the Federales’ “Fact Sheet” claim that you stand a 50-50 chance of injury or death by shooting a grizzly bear in self-defense.
It is also interesting to note that the Alaskan state researchers uncovered well over two thousand documented cases of DLPs over a period of just 26 years; that averages out to 88 attacks per year. Apply that average over a 126-year period and you could potentially have as many as 11,088 bear attacks to study. Examining 72 of those cases amounts to a statistical sampling of 0.65% which, no matter how I try to stretch it, seems to fall a tad bit short of proving anything with 97% certainty.
It was, however, personal experience that led to my own loss of faith in pepper spray. In the US Forest Circus, Department of Aggravation, we used to be required to take a yearly 4-hour block of instruction on the use of pepper spray in order to be “qualified” to carry it for protection in bear country. I recall most clearly the training session taught by a lady biologist. Pepper spray was much more effective than a firearm, she began, because an ex-boyfriend had taken her out shooting once and she wasn’t able to hit anything, thus proving that guns are ineffective. Since this was undoubtedly true from her personal perspective, I was willing to let that slide.
Other information during the training also made me go hhhmmmm. While the instructor claimed that pepper spray was indeed “proven” effective against bears (this occurred prior to the Smith-Herrero study), she admitted that it might not necessarily work against large felines, or canines, and legally could not be used as protection against two-legged varmints.
When we went outside for the practical demonstration of pepper spray, the class became truly enlightening. The instructor unlimbered the canister of pepper spray which she personally carried on duty in the woods and let fly. Only a small bit of liquid substance oozed rather sluggishly out of the nozzle and dribbled down her fingers. She washed her hands thoroughly, broke out a brand-new can of pepper spray still in the plastic wrapper, and took another poke at it. This can sprayed for somewhere close to a good half a second before it just up and quit entirely. But the third can, also brand-new in the wrap, worked as advertised, spraying out in a fan-shaped pattern and thus “proving” its superiority.
I, of course, had a huge problem with the whole one-in-three functionality rate. That did not inspire much confidence. I sure as hell wouldn’t advocate carrying a revolver if I could only count on two out of six cartridges actually going off when I dropped the hammer.
There was no wind that particular day, either. Knowing my luck, I always figured that if I ever had to use pepper spray it would be at the exact moment I was facing into a 40-mph headwind. Dispersion and/or blow-back due to wind can and does occur when using pepper spray, but I have yet to have a hardcast 300-grain .44 Magnum slug blow back on me in the breeze.
Lastly, I personally used USFS-approved capsaicin-based pepper spray in an attempt to haze a problem black bear out of a campground. On my first attempt, I sprayed the bear in the face out the truck window at a distance of 20-25 feet. This failed to impress the bear in question, a 2- or 3-year-old blackie that probably wouldn’t have weighed more than 150 pounds soaking wet. After being sprayed in the face, he snorted, shook his head vigorously, and ambled away in a leisurely fashion further into the campground. I headed him off at the pass and gave him another dose of pepper spray at similar range. This time he made a couple of sneezing noises, rubbed at his face and eyes irritably with a paw, then looked straight at me and growled. With a final snort he continued on his way, back into the campground, in no big hurry. A third application was mostly scattered by the wind, but the bear finally felt harassed enough to stroll unhurriedly off into the woods for the moment. He was back raiding the campground within the hour.
If I were an academic, I could cherry pick my own personal statistics and author a study “proving” that pepper spray has a 66% failure-to-fire rate and has been proven in the field to be 100% ineffective against black bears.
I am making no such ludicrous claims. Even I readily admit that such a small sampling is essentially worthless for the purposes of statistical proof. Why, that would be as ridiculous as, say, specifically cherry-picking a mere 0.65% of bear attacks spread out over a century and a quarter and claiming 97% efficiency.
I’m not saying, nor do I believe, that pepper spray is worthless or ineffective. It is a viable and valuable option that can greatly increase your personal safety in case of a bear attack. It can work quite effectively and has most certainly been used successfully on a great many occasions over the past couple of decades. It has saved lives, both human and ursine. Especially for people who don’t know anything about guns, it is an obvious choice. Pepper spray certainly beats the hell out of walking around the woods completely defenseless.
I am saying that, mainly for political reasons, the powers-that-be have intentionally and grossly over-stated the true effectiveness of pepper spray while deliberately denigrating the use of firearms.
As Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography, “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.’"
